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.
One of the oldest human pastimes, hating people who are different from you in some way, no matter how inconsequential.
“You ever notice that? Any time you see two groups of people who really hate each other, chances are good they’re wearing different kind of hats. Keep an eye on that, it might be important.” - George Carlin
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.
“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!
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
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
Don’t we kinda already have them?
bombastic side eyes at Beehaw
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.
The important thing here is to get back to social networks and away from social media. The important entities here are the humans, not the memes or the money or the uplems or whatever we eventually call them.
Humans connecting with humans in ways that advance our collective well-being is the promise of social networks that Facebook and Twitter started. Once they saw how many users they had (and the bills for hosting and coding) they got hyper focused on making money.
Hypothetically we can avoid that fate here by having the job of hosting and coding spread out among many. Especially if we also come up with a way to crowd fund the costs of hosting and coding.
I remember the war between /r/me_irl and /r/meirl back in the day on Reddit
Me_irl gang for life personally 😤
Technically Truth and Gab are activitypub compatible right? We can already fight with them
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
The 2nd largest instance has already de-federated themselves to create a walled garden with reddit-style moderation, eg you can be banned because the mods don’t like what you said, even if it does not break the rules. That instance is: beehaw.
Please do instance wars also on PeerTube, it’s noone land right now.
The problem with transitioning from YouTube to PeerTube is that without a critical mass of users it’s just not worth it for creators. But without creators the users won’t go there, because there’s no content.
Lemmy has that problem to a much lesser extend because this kind of platform is way more focused on the interaction between users. Or put differently, everyone is a creator here.
A tool that uploads and updates videos across multiple platforms while syncing descriptions, tags, etc is something that would be incredibly handy for creators while also being something that PeerTube could piggyback off of. “Why not upload my video to another platform I’ve never heard of? It can only lead to more exposure.”
What’s the Gentoo equivalent of an instance?
Building a CLI ActivityPub client from source.
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sounds lit. do you all take butter and salt with your popcorn?
Have you tried nutritional yeast?
hippy
I’m sorry, but I read that and thought “marmite on popcorn?!”
And I found that idea intriguing.
Not quite the same thing as Marmite. Might be a North American thing?
https://www.amazon.ca/Bragg-Nutritional-Yeast-Seasoning-Premium/dp/B00EHVN1S6
Ah, thanks! I’ll be on the look out for this.
