Federation is pretty cool, but kinda confusing, and maybe a little scary
Federation is pretty cool, but kinda confusing, and maybe a little scary
Last week, this strange mention appeared on my Mastodon feed. After a bit of clicking around, I figured out what had happened. A user on the Kbin social network had linked to my Mastodon profile. Thanks to the magic of the ActivityPub protocol, it filtered into my mentions - even though I've never e...
I've been on the Fediverse since 2016, and I still get a little mixed up by how things work.
Choosing who you federate with and then moderating abusive people that slip through anyway is going to be very important.
Choosing who you federate with
If instances get stricter about federation, I really hope small instances are still allowed to federate with the large ones. For example, I'm running my own Lemmy server just for me, and had no trouble federating. That's what I really like about the fediverse - my little server is essentially treated no differently to the massive ones. That's really the point of the fediverse.
It's very unlikely that big instances will start blocking small ones. It can certainly happen, but I think most people running Lemmy instances are more likely to want to federate. If they don't they'll probably run one of the forks that explicitly disable it, so you'll never know that they exist from your instance.
The possible problem with that is someone will eventually write a script that starts up new instances and then runs spambots on them. It's what happened with email. I think you can still self-host an email server, though, it's just a matter of running it well and communicating with the people that run blacklists if you get on one.
I think as long as you don't give them reason to, they won't have any reason to block you. They'd have to explicitly block you, after all. If they aren't noticing any problems then I don't see why they'd take the time to block you.
So basically, you should be fine.
I'm also planning on hosting my own Lemmy instance at some point too.
I don't really understand the whole "choose who you federate with", federation is a server-to-server thing as far as I am aware, and banning whole servers results in some of your users becoming unable to reach all of theirs, incurring a penalty on both sides. I don't think blocking users based on whoever hosts their account ever makes sense in the general case (it's a weak argument to prove someone "guilty by association"), and is incredibly unfair (the statement being made is that all users on that instance, without exception, should suffer the consequences of the actions of a few).
Unfortunately there isn't a finer grained tool. You can ban users, but if the instance they're from has open sign ups the banned user can just create a new account and return to harassing people on the server. This is the reason that Beehaw defederated with the two earlier this week. They tried everything they could before then, but the tools just aren't there yet to not punish the whole instance if the instance's admin isn't willing to meet part way.
Think about it this way. In real life, you choose who you associate with for many reasons. Do the same in the Fediverse. If your instance gets blocked look at your fellow users as to why, and to the admin policies of your instance administrators. The biggest issue is when Federation ends because that is disruptive. Keep in mind instances mostly never federate with all other nodes. They cannot. Some are illegal, others just full of bad actors and trolls.
I agree that it should be a last resort and it usually is. But when it happens look to your instance not the one de-federating.
That is really cool but, man, the tooling has to catch up quickly before the fediverse graduates from just “tech people” to the general public. I think the tooling will arrive but this is all so powerful/interconnected it can look scary if not managed well.
Makes sense. The blog post does highlight the openness of Federation, which is great when it's a niche and small collection of projects. The capability is still cool and potentially useful, but as Lemmy and kbin explode with Reddit refugees, and Mastodon so large with the Twitter-nots, it's getting busy.
I've already accidentally "followed" a Lemmy community from my Mastodon account, and I guess it works well enough, but the interface doesn't quite work for the medium.
Hopefully with all the displaced app developers, the Fediverse projects will gain steam.
Any new platform is going to have a learning curve, some more than others. But it's going to be as confusing or tricky as you want to make it. If you want to join and read every small detail about the inner workings, that's fine, but you may find blood leaking from your ears rather quickly. Just jump in, and get involved. That is the best and easiest way to learn. Yes, you may make some mistakes, or have to ask questions. But if people mock you for this, then you know the place you have joined isn't for you. As it's full of idiots.
One of the interesting things as a newbie is seeing how the relatively small existing population of the Fediverse reacts to the influx of new faces. The article sort of outlines an example of, as far as I understand it, exactly how the federated sites are supposed to work, but actually being faced with it is causing a little bit of trepidation and rethinking of old behaviors. Not really good or bad, just interesting.
From Mastodon side - you can actually decide how the content you're posting gets distributed.
Post visibility optionsOn other platforms it's possible to block users so you don't see their posts and comments. Is there any such facility in Lemmy?
If I click on a username there's a big block button in the top right hand corner of the screen. The "Blocked" tab on my profile settings also suggests the ability to block communities. I've heard that kbin supports blocking entire instances at a user level, but only instances can defederate from instances on lemmy
I've heard that kbin supports blocking entire instances at a user level
Yes, to do this, go to kbin.social/d/insertinstancehere, then block from there.
I think this is one of the strengths of kbin, because kbin itself can be open and neutral as much as possible and let each user decide the content they want/don't want to see. Of course this doesn't stop bad actors from coming over, making accounts, and start giving the instance a bad reputation, making it increasingly likely for it to be defederated by other instances...
Only communities afaik.
Not that I know of. And I don't think a Lemmy user can block (for example) a Mastodon user.
There is the ability to block users on Lemmy. And then they're really blocked, like you can no longer see any comments they made, or replies to their comments. And blocking a community should ensure that it doesn't show up when you're browsing all or searching.
