If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
And that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen. Instance wars and eventual defederation and fragmentation are important moderation tools, and will progress the culture and feel of instances and regions of the Fediverse. Many instances will form federated [cliques](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clique_(graph_theory) that are highly connected and have similar vibes and cultures, and some will be federated with multiple cliques, showing users a variety of cultures and situations.
If the Fediverse reaches a large enough number of people, it can support multiple independant cliques, and enable users see entire mini-universes with different communities and vibes.
imma have undercover alts everywhere for the sole purpose of getting all the cats communities in one page.
Your legend well be carved into the pages of history as the first person to complete the catalog!
One benefit that people don’t talk about enough is it naturally tends towards smaller community sizes than in a centralized system which is a better fit for our tribal human brains.
We’re not great with speaking into a room with 1,000 people in it, much less a million.
The problem is that it’s worse for keeping topics centralized and fragments communities for external reasons. It’s antithetical to the idea of a link aggregator where you centralize all of your news if you need to use several of them to make it work. Defederation should be a last resort to protect the admins from legal action, content manipulation, or brigading, not because beehaw thinks open signups harm their safe space. Making the internet a safe space is how we got to this point with Twitter/Google/meta/reddit, and everyone wants to do it all over again to rebuild their echo chambers.
Perhaps keeping topics de-centralized is a key part of keeping systems from turning tyrannical. That’s the theory behind the term “totalitarian”: that too much unification of thought produces behavioral restrictions, via the justification that if the truth of each topic is known and indisputable, then there’s no reason to share power in society as long as the person in power knows the One Truth.
Centralized systems designed to uncover one clear answer, such as stack overflow, have every reason to fight against redundancy in answers. Anything rightly called a community though should not be built around the (totalitarian) idea that conversations are best centralized and made non-redundant.
Big important questions need to be rehashed millions of times, not just covered once with millions of audience members.
99% of the content people post and interact with doesn’t have a reason for multiple copies of it’s conversation to exist. Most content is consumed not discusses.
Yet when a person arrives and asks a question they are discussing. If they wanted to consume, the could.
And the vast majority of the users consume the answers, not the discussion. They don’t ask the questions, hey look them up, and if no one asked, or no one answered, they can’t find anything and just give up. They don’t ask.
And some of them don’t even bother with trying to look it up. They just ask, because they like that method of getting information.
There is nothing better than a good old tribe war.
The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.
The way to solve it is to avoid having generic “anything goes” instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they’re interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we’re seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.
Don’t we kinda already have them?
bombastic side eyes at Beehaw
Isn’t it already? Lemmygrad, exploding-heads and other extremist instances have already been defederated. But the main feature is the federation itself, which also creates powerful alliances between instances with common values. Platform-wise, it will be just a matter of difference of use and leaning, but federation alliances will work the same
Technically Truth and Gab are activitypub compatible right? We can already fight with them
I have been running a Mastodon instance since like 2016/17 and this has been quietly happening for the entire time I’ve been on the fediverse. (I can’t check the exact date right now as I’m in the middle of upgrading it.)
Do you want to be in the Anime Girl Who Posts Nazi Memes Fediverse? How about the Queer Furry Fediverse? Or maybe you’d rather be in the Mocking Shitposts Fediverse? Perhaps you want the Everyone Has A Photo Of A Human And Thinks Federating With Facebook’s Activitypub Is Actually A Good Idea Fediverse? Or how about the TERF/Gender-Critical Fediverse? Or the “Standalone” Social Site That Is Actually A Fediverse Instance With Federation Disabled And The Credits Removed In Violation Of The Source License?
Some of these Fediverses will happily talk with others. Some of them will rapidly defederate from others as soon as they encounter a place that clearly belongs to a Fediverse they are incompatible with. Some of them quickly get defederated from the Fediverses they are incompatible with. Some of them look at the #fediblock tag, some to keep aware of places worth pre-emptively blocking to make a chill place to talk, some to look for fellow people who have been cast out of someone else’s chill zones.
Is this a bad thing? I thought kind of, curating who you associate with is one of the benefits
Not at all, I am very happy to be able to preemptively keep Terf Fedi and 4Chan Forever Fedi and all those other Fediverse the fuck out of my little corner of Queer Furry Fedi. Throwing everyone into one giant discussion forum and pushing them to fight with each other because that’s what keeps the ad impressions coming is not an experience I care to return to.
Realistically though I can’t be bothered to engage in “fighting about which instance is better to be in” though, I know which one is better for me and if you think that one is a shitty place for you to be then I am pleased to have you stay in whatever place you like as long as you don’t try to make the place I like stop existing or change to fit your desires.
I remember the war between /r/me_irl and /r/meirl back in the day on Reddit
Me_irl gang for life personally 😤
“Instance wars” sounds like the way “the consequences of my own actions” will be framed at a point.
The far right instances dripping with hate, bigotry and recycled propaganda will be in an “Instance war” with the mainstream instances talking about regular human being stuff - stuff like beans.
Grab your samurai swords, mall ninjas… and inventory your powdered eggs, theocratic fascist doomsday preppers…
The instance wars are coming for your unvaccinated, homeschooled, incel butts!
Were there mailserver wars?
Yes. In the mid 90’s, anyone with an AOL or Juno email address was a noob. Many people on the internet had .edu email addresses, because it was pretty hard to get internet access unless you were affiliated with a university. The rise of Hotmail and Yahoo mail ended up removing the association between email address and internet service provider, to the point where people who were using ISP-provided email addresses by the early 2000’s were seen as unsophisticated and usually older.
And now my parents won’t change ISP because they don’t want to change email addresses
This will likely follow a similar pattern to email, since it’s starting from a very similar position.
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person. People do that with cars, shoes, and yes, even email domains.
From a technical perspective, right now Lemmy is as anonymous as can be — I’ve yet to see an instance that requires ANY kind of verification. I didn’t need to provide an email address, phone number, or any other identifying information to sign up. Didn’t even need to solve a captcha. I just choose a name and set a password and BOOM! I was in.
Once upon a time, email worked this way, too. Then came the spammers, scammers, and other bad actors, and this was deemed untenable. Nowadays, any email provider that allows anonymous signup is likely to be blocked by most of the email-using world. You won’t be able to use them to sign up for other services, and you might not even have your mail accepted by other providers.
This will definitely become a problem as Lemmy becomes popular, and instance admins will need to crack down, lest they be overrun and defederated by the rest of the world.
I’m not sure what the answer is. This is a problem that has not been adequately solved, IMHO. A few bad apples spoil the bunch. That’s been true since long before the Internet.
At some point people will begin to assign identities to instances and imagine (rightly or wrongly) that being on an instance says something about a person.
*Cough
Wait - what kind of proof of identity do Gmail, outlook, Yahoo, etc require to make an email address?
I’m not sure about all of them, but for Google, you can’t create a new account without a valid phone number for SMS verification. If you created your account a long time ago then you’re kind of grandfathered in and don’t need to add a phone. They don’t allow known VOIP numbers (including Google Voice) and I think you cannot use the same number for lots of accounts.
This might vary by country. My experience is with the US version of gmail.
Hm I have made at least 3 gmail addresses and didn’t have to do this. And in fact their apps support account switching pretty easily, which seems to indicate that they don’t really disapprove of making multiple accounts.
In fact the only thing they asked for was a backup email address in case you get locked out or they need to send security alerts, and that was optional.
Interesting. I had to make a new account just a couple weeks ago (for Android testing as part of my job) and there was no option to continue without SMS verification. Couldn’t use a landline, couldn’t use VOIP, couldn’t fall back to email verification or anything else.
One of my coworkers was unable to use their cell phone number because Google said it was already in use. But it let me use the same number I have associated with my personal account, so go figure.
Interesting, could be because it’s something you’ve had to do often enough that they’re trying to rate limit you
I just hope that most people will be open-minded and that most instances will federate. But that’s probably being optimistic.
No, this is exactly what will happen, though there will be bubbles of similar minded instances, no doubt, but given the federate nature of this all, I don’t think someone will make their instance incompatible to the rest, except of course some corpos get their hands on it… looking at meta
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The fact that all instances talk to each other, makes me think we likely won’t have wars.
I mean I’m subscribed to beehaw and kbin communities. And everything in between.
That’s totally something a kbin user would say.
I’m new… What are Beehaw and kbin?
Beehaw is a large lemmy instance which is notable for defederating from some other large instances recently due to their own admin policy. Kbin is an alternate federated platform similar to Lemmy, and the two can mostly work with each other.
What are instances and federations?
I just thought that it was Reddit, but with a different backend. But people are talking like there’s more to it than that…
Ok so Lemmy itself isn’t really a single app or service like Reddit, rather it’s a software project that people can run on their own servers. It’s a bit like email in that regard, anyone can run an email server, or you can just join someone else’s like Gmail (think of instances as being like these). Instances can have their own rules and customisations, but they all still talk email (in lemmys case, something called activitypub) and work together, and you can send and receive content from other people even if they’re on a different email provider (lemmy instance). Federating is basically two different instances agreeing to connect and share their content with each other. This generally happens by default. Defederating is the opposite, deciding to stop sending and receiving content from a particular instance.
Email is also a federated platform just like Lemmy. You can have email clients that talk to email servers, but “email” itself isn’t really an app you can just run, it’s a collection of apps and servers that all work together. Lemmy is very similar.
Also worth noting, the language (or protocol, to use the technical term) that Lemmy uses to talk between instances is called ActivityPub, and a whole bunch of different services such as Mastodon and Kbin use this! Together, these services are known as the “Fediverse” and the really cool thing is that they can all talk to each other because they speak the same language! If you want to, you can technically browse and post on Lemmy from Mastodon, and vice versa, even though they’re completely different services. While it’s a bit tricky with Mastodon since its much more like Twitter than Reddit, Kbin works really well with Lemmy and is generally interchangeable. People on Lemmy can join in on Kbin and vice versa. The whole system is really neat and if it sounds interesting, you should absolutely google it some more and learn all about it! It’s a community project so if you like it and want to get involved, you can help create any part of this from contributing to Lemmy’s code to running your own instance.
Thanks for the explanation and the time taken to write it.
I’m starting to figure it out as I stumble my way around it. For example I’ve found that Lemmy.World (my ‘home’ instance) isn’t big on NSFW stuff, so I’ve made an account on another instance and linked the two.
Thanks again!
There’s so much more to it than that, but I’m too new and generally technically inept to properly explain it
Already happening. Have you heard of Beehaw?
Competition is good. Competition keeps us strong.
what about beehaw? i’ve seen it around, but know not of any instance wars.
Beehaw defederated from a lot of servers and nobody knows why.
It’s because they’re lame.
Interesting to hear this from a dirty lemmy.fmhy.ml-er! 😈
