Fediverse

I have my skepticisms about this whole thing. While I know the answer is "they will be defederated", what if one of the big ones, like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml get huge, then sell out to something like Meta?

We lost 3rd party apps and we are morning the biggest breakup we've ever had with reddit. Say the server you've had your account on for so long and all your content gets taken over by a giant with strategically placed adds that are upvoted by bot armies for visibility. They may get defederated, but that means Meta just came in and destroyed a huge chunk of users accounts while gaining some ad revenue for a bit until the community dies. Everyone has to actively pack up their shit and move to another instance. I guess the loyalty to an account is less with a lack of account karma so it wouldn't burn as bad.

You would lose all your subscribed communities when you are forced to move out. That would suck. Too bad you couldn't export like a .db file from your account on the way out and upload it to another account on another instance. Possibly some sort of encrypted key so you can auto add as a mod to any community you were modding on your previous account. No clue if that makes any sense. Kinda Like a lemmy "Go-Bag"?

I don't know, just thinking ahead of the shenanigans that's going to happen if this really starts making a dent in huge corporations user counts.

Jury is till out it’s way too early to tell. The fediverse seems very unrefined still (which I kind of enjoy tbh). If its truly going “save the internet”, a lot of refining needs to be done in order to attract at a mainstream scale.

It’s been really refreshing so far though.

“But at the very least, if a server goes down, it should not be catastrophic to you.” Your social world shouldn’t live inside an app, she says, or depend on a company staying solvent. It should, and could, be much bigger than that.

Exactly

Alright so I'm skeptical we'll keep a useful level of signal to noise the whole time (Usenet). But, for the first time in forever I'm optimistic, there's a lot more technical talent and awareness of how bad it can go this time around, which is amazing to see.

I still don't think people have grappled with the fact there's no total "erase" button even if you can port your data.

But we have open standards again, it feels weird.

It's like Web 1.0, all over again, but this time with better technology

It already has for me. Most websites I visit today I run myself. How amazing is that?

Really good article.

Can the verge build a pc?

I ahve massive issues being federated with Facebook, twitter and the other billionaire tech giants. No thanks. I do NOT want them to be able to feed me information. Corporations should have zero ability to discuss or provide input into the lives or regular humans. They have done enough damage and it's time they be silenced.

That's what ActivityPub has planned.

Well, that is kind of what ActivityPub is already allowing us to do.

ACTIVITYPUB!

Save the internet from what? Being owned by large corporations? Maybe. Stopping the spread of misinformation through echo chambers and getting rid of hate speech? No, definitely not.

I have hope but my big concern is the scalability/efficiency of the thing. SOOoo much data is getting copied and duplicated across the federation links, and in some ways that's good, but it also bloats the overall cost of operation and that bloat makes it all the harder for altruism and donations alone to keep things afloat.