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Fediverse sustainability (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.

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[–] 2 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

But it should be centralized.

Again, I really don't see why. Content/Peer discovery can all be made transparent for the user, addressing and distribution as well.

I see the benefit for those building the platforms which in turn make these networks more attractive to users, and I see how the overall cost of the whole system is lower if it is centralized (economies of scale and avoid redundancies), but I'm failing to see how (all else being equal) the users benefit from a centralized system over a distributed one.

The fact that you are on LW and I'm not does not stop us from doing anything on Lemmy that is possibly only on reddit. Why benefit would there be for me to join LW?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Like I said above, specifically for the "I want to socialize" use case of social media sites, there's no upside to federation. It makes discovery harder, and a giant portion of what made Reddit so amazing was the random stumbling into things.

    And yes, sure, federated systems can be made to more closely emulate such a centralized approach, but that's why I said it that way: A centralized pool of social media content (for a given social media platform) is beneficial to the user, they can randomly stumble into topics and groups, and filter things down to what they desire.

    In an ideal federated system, that is in turn exactly how the content would look for the user: They'd not even realize the content isn't all on whatever instance they're on, it's fully transparent. Because that's easier for the user. No matter how low the barrier to finding federated content is, there's still no upside for the user having to take that step and go hunt for federated concept. From the perspective of the user, that is.

    It's not a big issue of course, but it does mean that by default, more users flock to where there are already more users.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I think we are talking past each other. I understand that the current implementation of the federated social media lacks a lot of things, so I am not disagreeing that currently people would benefit from joining a bigger instance.

    But my argument though is that we can have federated social media does not tend to overcentralization. If the Fediverse gets popular - really popular, tens of millions of active users popular - then there will be too many independent actors who will be participating and the whole system will lend itself to many different hosting schemes:

    1. business running their own servers, to keep their control over their own social media identity.
    2. companies who will give access to users contingent on another service (e.g, the NYT giving a free account to every subscriber of their newspaper, Vodafone setting up their own Mastodon service, free access for every mobile customer)
    3. public institutions
    4. self-hosters, community groups
    5. companies who will offer the service for "free" and will try to monetize the service through some other means (e.g, Facebook/Threads)

    IOW, if things grow and it becomes a viable alternative to the status quo, it will end up as a core infrastructure component, like email. And yes, Gmail is by far the largest provider and the hold a lot of power, but even they can't simply decree to flip the tables in their favor.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I disagree... as a user you want relative proximity, but not centralisation. Which is exactly what federation provides.

    Think of it like stores:

    The centralized social-media is a bit like those big-box stores that have a little of everything. Hard to navigate and find the stuff, usually they only offer the items with broader appeal, and the entire experience is just unpleasant.

    The Fediverse is more like a mall with many smaller shops. Small niche shops can survive because the many other shops drive foot traffic and if you are not interested in tools for example, you can just not enter the hardware store.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Like I said above, specifically for the “I want to socialize” use case of social media sites, there’s no upside to federation.

    The hell there is.

    When "I want to socialize", I don't have to go march up at the UN headquarters, the Vatican or whoever "controls people" and ask for consideration. I can literally just walk out my door and walk to my local plaza. Or maybe the local grocery market. If I'm feeling lucky I can take the first googelbus and go to the nearest stadium, anime store or vintage disco bar. None of those needs to rely on the fact that other supermarkets or stadiums exist to provide socialization.

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