For-profit tech companies like #Threads and #Flipboard are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, and that’s been causing a lot of chaos lately. Thus, I’ve found it helpful to take a step back, consider what it is about the fediverse that I value, and think about whether federation with these large platforms will bring us closer to or further from those goals.

With that in mind, I’ve come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an “ideal” fediverse:

  1. No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
  2. Users can move between instances without penalty.
  3. Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
  4. People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
  5. There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.

While this ideal fediverse isn’t necessarily realistic or achievable, I’d like to see instance owners act in the interest of these principles. These definitely aren’t comprehensive and are of course my opinion, so what do you think an ideal fediverse looks like? Do you think these statements are good goals to aim for or not?


Now, to elaborate:

No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.

This is important for instances to be able to defederate from those with bad moderation, harmful values, etc. If a person or group controls a big portion of the content that people see on an instance, then that instance will lose a lot of that content should they defederate. That person or group would essentially be able to do whatever, and instances would find difficulty defederating because they’d lose so much visible activity and thus users.

If a single entity gets enough dominance over activity, they could make defederation from them out of the question for a ton of users. Furthermore, that entity could cripple the fediverse by simply leaving it, taking a bunch of users from other instances with them. This is a big concern many people have with Threads; if 90% of the activity you see on mastodon.social comes from Threads, then Meta would be able to nab a ton of mastodon.social users by leaving the fediverse, facing those users with the choice of either losing a ton of their connections & follows or jumping ship to Threads.

But you don’t even need a supermajority of content to cause that much harm. For example, take the threadiverse (Lemmy/Kbin). A large portion of visible activity is controlled by the admins of lemmy.world. Thankfully, they seem to nice people, but if they were to start (for example) being more lax with hate speech, other Lemmy/Kbin instances would either have to deal with it or lose access to a large portion of the activity pool. If any threadiverse instance were to defederate from lemmy.world — even if the lemmy.world admins started acting against the interests of the fediverse and its users — that instance would lose a dangerous number of users.

Users can move between instances without penalty.

One of the main benefits of the fediverse is that you can move to a different instance and still be able to view the same content. If the admins of your instance start making moderation decisions you disagree with or you just decide that you want to be on an instance that you yourself run, you’re able to move and still interact with the content pool. Thus, as long as the platform your destination instance uses (e.g., Firefish, Kbin, Mastodon) supports the same type of content as your old one, you should be able to move without any downsides. The more penalty there is for moving, the more people will feel trapped on an instance even if they want to leave.

This is partially a matter of robust systems for moving accounts, but it’s also a matter of having good options available. Mastodon has a ton of active, stable instances, so if you ever want to move (e.g., because your instance is or isn’t defederating from Threads), you can do so and still be able to use Mastodon. However, the only such instance on Kbin is kbin.social (not counting instances that run Mbin, a fork with different features & development). If you want to move from kbin.social to another Kbin instance, you don’t really have a lot of options. And if you’re on something that’s closed-source, you’ll be forced to move to a different platform entirely, which may not be great for the user — an important reason why free and open-source software should be prominent on the fediverse.

Obviously, this is something that might be impossible to achieve. But even if we can’t eliminate the strings attached to moving to another instance, we should try to minimize them.

People can create and run their own instances to their liking with minimal effort.

If a user wants to, they should be able to control their interactions on the fediverse through running their own instance, and doing so should require as little effort as is feasible. Many people have already set up single-person instances for the purpose of having more control over their data. If people can’t do that, then they’re forced to put their account and content under the control of other people. Of course, most people are fine with this provided that they trust their instance admins, but the option to be your own admin should be as available as possible.

This is part of why it’s so important to have prominent open-source platforms. If Mastodon weren’t open-source, then anyone who likes Mastodon but wants to control their content would be out of luck. If you like the Threads interface but don’t want to be on an instance run by Meta, you just don’t have that option.

People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.

If someone isn’t aware that they’re on the fediverse, then they can’t really benefit from the openness and customizability that it provides. A mastodon.social user who knows nothing of the fediverse won’t know that they can move to a different Mastodon instance or interact with the same content using Friendica, as they won’t know that the options exist to begin with.

Furthermore, people will have more incentive to preserve an open fediverse if they’re aware that it exists. If the fediverse is filled with people who, for example, think that Threads is all there is or didn’t come to Threads with an awareness of the fediverse, the fediverse becomes much easier to undermine.

There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.

If someone wants to join a closed-source instance run by a for-profit company, they should absolutely be able to. However, that should ideally be because they prefer an instance moderated by Meta, not because the free and open-source alternatives are relatively lacking. Open-source software is extremely important in order for users to have options and agency, so we should aim for these factors to not come with a sacrifice. Otherwise, companies will be able to draw most newcomers to their instance and attain a large share of the content on the fediverse, which is bad as discussed with Statement #1.

Going by this principle, if the owner over a closed-source fediverse platform starts trying to create exclusive functionality that would attract people their instance, they should be regarded with extreme caution. If you’re familiar with the whole “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” thing, a company doing such would be the “Extend” phase of EEE, and that’s a situation we should avoid at all costs.

  • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Do “we” control that, like if I’m with Lemmy.world, we can defederate simply never federate them at all if we want right? And there’s technically no way Meta can fuck with that if we make that choice, right?

    • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
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      11 months ago

      Again, social vs technical. You „can“ but you loose 90% of activity. The users who grew accustomed to your level of activity will see a barren wasteland which is what OP describes.

      • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        We were already without that activity because Meta was late to the game. I would ask you to reframe your response in light of that.

        Like how does it hurt us if we never had it to begin with and wouldn’t its effect only be contingent on the extent to which we are ok with or “our” attitude towards growth (and how much growth)?

        Edit: I guess I would sort of clasify myself as a content-creator or conversation-starter and I’ve never had issues with engagement and I always have random stuff I think of that I want to explore and put out there so I don’t really see the issue I guess

        • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
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          11 months ago

          While I trust you‘re asking honestly, this topic has already been discussed a ton of times:

          We are in a very dire situation worldwide due to corporations ruling everything and keeping us from doing what is necessary (solving world hunger, climate change, wars).

          Often we ask ourselves „how did we get here“ and the corporations (through public figures which they are paying) have an answer for you:

          • immigrants
          • the left
          • the right
          • politicians
          • yourself

          And all of these answers do hold some truth depending on your view. But they’re all deflection. And its a long game. They do stuff that is pleasant, like making affordable smart tvs available. But then they put ads in them that you cant turn off without tech knowledge.

          Same with threads. We‘re not in dystopia yet with threads but we‘re asking a convicted child rapist to take care of our kids. Sure, nothing bad will come of it, right?

          More precisely, it will take the fediverse about 3 months to get used to the 10x amount of engagement. After that it will be tremendously hard to defederate without a chunk of users.

          Everyone who barely understands how mass psychology works can tell you this.

          • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            list of deflections

            Ya, I noticed its everything and everyone BUT the corporation that directly operates in whatever domain aha. Every time, it really does suck :(

            Who’s the convicted child rapist btw? You’re not talking about Zuck are you or whoever runs Threads?

            Also, we don’t really disagree on anything…I don’t think we should federate at all with anything Meta or any other group that has a history of Embracing/Extending/Eliminating or whatever. I feel like we’re doing fine with whatever we have and are doing now.

            Its all tops currently and I see no need to change our calculus or do anything but let FaceB/Met fuck themselves over in time as they always do

            They can’t singlehandedly or multi-handedly really do anything to kneecap the Fediverse, thats the whole freaking point of the Fediverse a d why we’re all here + invested (if in time rather than money) in the first place 🤓

            I would embrace and extend JFK’s famous urging:

            We have nothing to avoid/fear but dependance itself

            • haui@lemmy.giftedmc.com
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              11 months ago

              Thanks for the kind answer. This is fun. :)

              The child rapist is a metaphor. We‘re not scared of our kids getting r*ped in this case but of us and the kids getting (among other things) manipulated to high heavens which meta has been convicted for again and again. Search for metas human rights violations and you will be serviced better than I could ever do.

              You actually made me think of an idea. We could auto defederate any single instance that is more in size than the others combined. I‘d need to check the numbers but I don’t think we have this kind of situation rn.

              If we made this a rule, corpos could split their giant places into instances which can then be federated and defederated individually. The idea is still a wip obviously.

              • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Very cool ;) Yeah, maybe share that on c/Fediverse and your intance admins and maybe we can all figure out a workable solution.

                I’d still prefer we avoid any dependance or engagement with Meta and other offenders. Thats always how they get you. They “change” and see the light but its all an act until they get strong enough/you’re weak enough that they can finish the job.

                And it would be on us cuz we tried to breast-feed/expected to breast-feed off snake and scorpions. No excuse for us to not be aware of their modus operandi and not immediately reject basically anything they touch