Ask Lemmy

The Fediverse is controlled by the people. Mainstream social media is controlled by wannabe kings.

The classic example is email; Imagine if you could only email people on Outlook, from another Outlook account. It's intuitive how shitty that would be, but for some reason we give social media a free pass for doing exactly this.

The benefits are (analogously):

• if you notice Yahoo users send you a lot of spam, you just block all of Yahoo. Sure, you might miss something important, but that's their fault for using Yahoo.
• if some dickhead like The Zucc releases a new email service (Threads) then maybe your email service (instance) will do you a favor and block them (defederate).
• pedos and bigots look for instances which is known for hosting shady shit, effectively acting as a containment barrier (most instances defederate these by default). Would never see that happen on Twitter (thank you Elon! /s).
• if an instance crashes, that sucks. But there are many others hosting federated content, so Lemmy will never be 'down'.

New platforms can set up shop and already have an existing userbase/contentbase to show. The main issue with setting up, let's say, an Instagram competitor, is that nobody uses it, so nobody will use it as it lacks content. ActivityPub removes this problem. If someone wanted to set up their own competitor to Mastodon, they can. People can use it and tap into the existing userbase.

There is no single point of failure.

If one instance goes down they don't take the whole thing with it. If one instance gets taken over by corporate interests, it does not take all the other instances with it.

If a community on sweatyballs.social is dogshit, someone can create the same named community on poopfed.io as a replacement. The site administrator of sweatyballs.social can't do anything about that.

This can also be a negative to some degree, but being able to block and defederate allow for mitigating those risks.

The biggest thing is control and censorship.

On the corporate side if your posts and content are seen as too extreme in one way or another, depending on what government or group ... you can be censored and have you posted either deleted, dismissed or hidden. In extreme cases, your account can also be shut down.

Xitter is already a propaganda hell hole that only pushes right wing content because they pushed out any criticism.

FB actively pushes its own content based on the highest bidder which often just means pushing right wing and conservative content in a regular basis.

Bluesky as open as it's supposed to be has already had problems in Turkey where the government there asked bluesky to restrict access to many accounts.

The Fediverse will have these same problems and people and governments will try to censor people but due to the open non centralized nature of the system, it will be much harder for any one group or government to censor anyone. The only way they could shut it down would be to completely outlaw any platform that uses the protocol everywhere.

You data isn't hoarded up and sold by the likes of meta etc.

No single entity can ruin it. We've seen that happen over and over when someone's political or economic goals conflict with user interests.

BlueSky actually talks about this quite a bit, viewing the company as a potential future adversary of the current developers' goals. I'm not sure their design choices align with that in practice, but they articulate the argument well.

Another cool thing is the broader reach federation provides. Someone with a Wordpress site need only install a plugin and people can follow it with Mastodon and the like. Tag a community in a post and it shows up on Lemmy too. This is underused so far, but I hope to see it continue to grow.

It’s the best.

Social media owned by some billionaire asshole is for idiots.

No billionaire owns any angle of human behavior.

Except maybe blood lust.

They own my blood lust.

I’m thirsty.

control is dispersed and you can flee bs to a better instance. This makes it almost impossible to censor in a targeted way.

No fucking algorithm, honestly. I don’t need some rich white pricks trying to constantly show me what they want me to see.

Pro:

• Interplatform Interaction(Activity Pub): Instances if the same platform and the Instances themselves can communicate (message, post, upvote, etc) with each other if they are federated.
• Decentralized: Community managed instances means no commertial interest, no single point of failure and the option of having your own rules. Intances with bad rules or intentions do not get federated (can't interact with each other).
• Free Open Source Software: Transparency and community contributions, If a project is abandoned it can always come back in the form a fork..
• Privacy: No data collection, no data selling from the platform/intances themselves.
• No advertisements
• No shitty UI

Con:

• Decentralized: People do not expect to have to choose a instance(server), and assume they are missing out on the other servers joining a particular one. And since its community supported the uptime and longevity of instances may be cut short.
• Free Open Source Software: Community volunteers to delevop the platforms on their free time means that sometimes development can be slow or even the project is abandoned.
• Cost on missing out on already established Big Tech platforms

It takes power away from the hands of corporations.

Sorry you got suckered into choosing bluesky over Mastodon. Hopefully you'll learn one day.

The only advantage I can see is that is goes back to a more fragmented internet.

The internet of hundreds of forums forming small communities, but this time you don't need to make an account on every single forum.

All the problems I see people complaining about in my opinion they all have in common one thing, too many people in a single place. Either because it gets impossible to manage and moderate or it needs to make money because it is very expensive to run.

It isn't. It just aligns better with the privacy preferences of some people.

You can play with moderation tiers. We have societies with Reddit-tier fascist moderators and other societies where the moderation just bans spammers and flooders. That's nice. Of course we're shifting to moderation craziness too, but very slowly and it is impossible to completely kill the freedom because of the federation background.

More choice, individual and grouped control, while still being - by default - connected between instances and platforms which would otherwise be splitting if people and critical mass.

Mostly just the resilience and control. An outage or censorship incident on one node can be contained, isolated, and users can easily go around it.
"Oh no, my preferred instance went down!" switches to another instance with the exact same content

Also, I think some European governments run Mastodon servers for themselves. Which sounds weird, but makes more sense in an IT security context. Their data, stored on their servers, that they manage. No third party business contractors needed.

The special thing about federated social media is that if you don't like something about one specific instance you can go to another instance or even create your own and still be part of the whole system. You're not stuck with some leadership that you have to endure. Instead you can be your own boss or choose a nice place to stay.

I think all the other things that people like about it, like "no algorithm", come naturally from this fact but are not inherent to the system.

Its more obvious on Mastodon since Mastodon federates with everybody. Imagine, while being on Twitter and without leaving the Twitter app, being able to post and comment on Reddit, watch YouTube videos and leave comments, and also interact with people on Instagram and Facebook. Some blogs also federate too via WordPress. I know you dont have to imagine that since you're here, but when I first started out it blew my mind.

Now, the way I phrase it to people I'm pitching the platforms to is "You get to choose whether you want to be in the hands of either a Corp that wants to turn you into profits for their shareholders, or you can put your data in the hands of some autistic dork who is really, really passionate about either server architecture or infosec. There's pros and cons there. Bluesky and Twitter fundamentally are not on your side, they want money from somewhere, but they can afford to pay people to both keep their servers running efficiently and defend against bad actors. The admins of Lemmy and Mastodon are fundamentally on our side, but the quality you're going to see is on par with a hobby project."

Think of federation as potential redundancy for data and discussion. Individually an instance of whatever platform you're using can be great, bad, or start off nice and get worse, but as long as there is federation of the good parts of communication among the people, there's going to be somewhere else you can go if your first source goes downhill. It's not perfect, but it's far better than a single location where users are at the mercy of whoever runs and controls it.

In your example, if bluesky goes you lose it all (until/if their form of federation actually exists and is usable). If the Mastodon server I'm on (toot.community, because I like the name) goes, you move to another or host your own and keep on trucking.

When reddit did their API shit i left and lost the account, subreddits, apps, everything. When Lemm.ee announced it's shutdown i moved to lemmy.zip and picked up exactly where I left off.

Content is not being actively pushed upon you, rather it's you that decide what you see like Facebook was at the beginning.

It allows you to use the platform to keep up with other people's lives instead of watching ads, news article someone liked and you're not interested in and ragebait.

There's 1️⃣ unique draw to the fediverse : depending on service , you can (view|interact with) all different kinds of posts without (necessarily) needing to create separate accounts for different services (experience will vary depending on what software your instance runs though) . Examples :

• Can view (peertube|pixelfed|lemmy|.*) posts directly from your mastodon account
• [km]bin are threadiverse softwares that also allow you to (view|post) the twitterlike style posts you see on (mastodon|(.*)(oma|key)|.*) instances and not just reddit style threadiverse posts

… but that's about where tangible benefits end IMO . Fediverse only better in (technical|data privacy|potentiality) sense , may be more resistant to enshittification (tangent : wish there was better word for this , "enshittification" sounds kinda stupid IMHO) but don't believe it's completely immune

Also I've seen enough fedimeta to know "run by huge dickwads" not (exclusive to centralised services|isolated issue) . Every other big fediverse (instance|project) feels like it's managed by temporarily embarrassed (Elon musk|matt mullenweg)s , so like , pick your poison !

Resilience. Federated social media is resilient against censoring and corporate takeover.

It.does however not help with eee attacks which I why most of us block threads and a lot will block other fediverse sized (or larger) single instances of eg bluesky etc.

Other, less important (to me) benefits are no algorithms, no profit motive, no ads.

The fediverse is just better in any way.

I think this video explains it better than I could do https://videos.elenarossini.com/w/64VuNCccZNrP4u9MfgbhkN

Aside from the theoretical reasons, which are great, it feels like on the federated services there's less speaking at people, and more actual conversations.

AOL had a social media platform. So did MySpace. They were monolithic. Where are they now?

Federated social media is decentralized, so one single jackass can control it completely.

Like, maybe Elon Musk buys pawb.social, he now controls pawb.social & can be a tyrant in pawb.social just like he has been with Twitter.

He still can’t control quokk.au, or lemmy.world, or feddit.org, or lemmy.ca, or lemmy.dbzer0.com, or lemmy.blahaj.zone, etc.

And in the extremely unlikely event that if Elon does manage to buy pawb.social, it is extremely likely that many lemmy servers would just defederate from pawb.social & leave pawb.social isolated from the rest of the fediverse.