Fair warning, this is something that’s been in my head for a while now, and I just want to get it off my chest. This is going to be a very emotionally charged post, so… I guess take everything with a grain of salt and with the understanding that I suck at word choice.
So this is partially in response to l_b_i’s thread asking about Lemmy/Yiffit here: https://yiffit.net/post/3318470 . Would have responded there, but that seems to be focused on Lemmy (and particularly Yiffit) side of thing, and I want to rant about the fediverse as a whole.
So, firstly the software. I think Mastodon is a really good piece of kit. As a Twitter competitor, it’s really good and has more than enough features. It also makes a fairly solid ActivityPub reader, although it doesn’t really work with Lemmy that well.
Lemmy is rough around the edges, but that can be fixed with work. The leanings of the developers might be concerning, but it’s AGPL so whatever.
ActivityPub as a whole is a cool concept, many social media networks connecting together regardless of platform. Anyone heard of pixelfed? No? It just kinda happened and if you have Mastodon you might have been following a Pixelfed user without realizing it.
I just… Have been increasingly frustrated at the aristocracy running everything recently. There’s just so much drama between admins that result in them completely severing connections between instances. And this isn’t petty squabbles between two small instances either, these are large instances with up to several thousand users each. Constantly falling out and causing their users to fall out of touch.
Personally, I’ve been using the Fediverse seriously since like April (or whenever the Reddit drama started), and currently have 5 fediverse accounts (excluding my super secret AD ones). I’d consider them all to have been on instances involved in fediverse politics that had resulted in some amount of connections being lost.
Since April, to my knowledge, there’s been three major fediverse-wide “dramas” that have resulted in major instances either defederating or threatening to defederate. One was started by someone who had perhaps too much influence and inability to listen to feedback, one was started by a literal troll and one was started by Facebook. How does a platform that prides itself on being censorship resistant let itself fall apart this easily!?
I don’t want to have to feel like I have to keep on track of the latest fediverse politics. I don’t want to have to feel like I have to keep a backup of my followers list just in case something happens. I don’t want to feel like I have to frequently change instance due to the influence of some other instance. I don’t want to have to feel like I have to “pick a side” in conflicts that are mostly hidden in an unsearchable space.
Hell, the Mastodon devs literally had to add a screen to the defederation flow that basically says “this is how many people you are going to fuck up”.
I just want a place to look at people in funny animal costumes and fancy coloured pixels. Maybe it’s because of autism, maybe this is a neurotypical thing as well, but personally I am very uncomfortable with the idea of losing contact with people I follow without realizing it and not being able to regain that contact. I’m also heavily vulnerable to obsessing over drama and politics (and try to curate my feed to avoid it as much as possible), which I can’t really do against this stuff.
For the Fediverse to work, we NEED to fix this. We need to get better. Maybe something simple like this: https://furry.engineer/@savvywolf/111292057237519826 . Maybe a public record of accountability for instances that explains why things happened.
Honestly, with these issues being a frequent enough occurrence I can’t really wholeheartedly shill Mastodon as a Twitter/Bluesky alternative anymore…
For reference, if you were a furry content creator looking for an instance to maximise reach, I’d personally recommend you avoid the following instances (from personal experience):
- beehaw.org
- furry.engineer
- lemmy.world
- mastodon.art
- mastodon.scot
- mastodon.social
- meow.social
- tech.lgbt
- Any instance with a hidden blocklist
- Very small instances, since they have limited reach and may vanish.
Not saying these instances are bad, it’s just that, through their fault or otherwise, they’ve been involved in drama that has effectively cut them off from parts of the fediverse.
Anyway, thanks for reading my rant. Apologies for having to do this and ruining your day, but I just needed to get it off my chest.
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The biggest problem with small communities is discovery. You wont just stumble on new things, you have to seek everything out.
My reasoning for that was for the following:
- If you want reach, being on a big instance means you show up in the feed for that instance. Not sure how much of an effect this actually has, especially once people start following you from other instances, but it’s something I’ve heard.
- Bigger instances usually have more resources to stay around longer, and have bigger mod teams to hold them accountable.
- And the big thing: Some instances (or at the very least that instance) have reputations of bullying smaller ones into complying with their demands. It hurts your instance more than theirs if they defed you.
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I’m not an expert on any of this and I don’t even have a Mastodon account, but this is how it looks from my perspective:
Defederation is a necessary evil for decentralization to exist, and decentralization needs to exist or we are fucked. I think at the very least we need more finesse with how defederation works, i.e. choosing whether to cut off everything, communities, users, etc. It’s an inherently-hard problem to work with, and largely you’ll get the best results by just making your own 1-person server. This isn’t feasible for most people right now, but this may be the ultimate solution in the future. P2P Matrix is trying to operate with this idea (though currently it’s stalled a bit due to funding), and we may see better solutions as we approach it. Maybe the future is running a micro-server on your phone, subscribing to a couple Fediblock lists (curated by mature people), and that’s the end of it.
As for right now, we need more responsible admins and some accountability. Large corporate sites work because they’re stable and they won’t kneejerk ban large sections of users by association (imagine Facebook banning everyone from a certain country because one of them was harassing another user). The Fediverse is full of emotionally charged people with very strong ideals, and that’s okay, but we’re held captive along with them if they’re an admin. Lemmy.ml banned Yiffit because they have NSFW communities - these are the kinds of people we are tip-toeing around at the moment.
Defederation is a necessary evil for decentralization to exist, and decentralization needs to exist or we are fucked.
Agreed, most people fight tooth and claw against it because of “muh user freedom” and the fact they were promised unlimited decentralization.
But if you’ve been on Nostr you know it’s necessary to have a decent platform, otherwise the ones who are the loudest and most aggressive rule. For people who like that, that’s great but for anyone who wants decent conversation like the one we’re having it’s awful (I guarantee this thread if on Nostr would be filled with alt-right bigots and trolls talking about unrelated shit).
I think the biggest issue is that many people aren’t made aware of it before joining, not going to lie, many Fediverse talks leave it out, phrasing the Fediverse as something more connected like Nostr, as opposed to what it is. There’s also instances making promises they can’t keep, such as saying they’ll never defederate or only defederate in case of illegal content, which isn’t good moderation.
It needs to be well known to people joining that defederation is a thing and why it happens, otherwise we’ll get people here who aren’t Fediverse material, which has been happening for a while now unfortunately.
The whole de-federation/netsplit issue is exactly what keeps me from joining mastodon. Like you I have autism, and I guess my “completionism” makes me annoyed at the idea of not having access to the entire fediverse (warts and all). Mastodon not fetching a user’s old posts when you first follow them is also a huge annoyance if you’re using a smaller server.
With lemmy I managed to find a server that isn’t blocked anywhere and only blocks one pedo instance, so it’s okay for me for now. For the average user though, the fact you can’t just say “pick any server, you will be able to access stuff from all servers” is probably the biggest issue hampering adoption.
@RobotToaster @savvywolf absolutely yes, i totally feel the same
In my opinion the problem is the idea of connectedness is way oversold, to the point where some people believe the Fediverse is something it isn’t, a decentralized “free speech” network. There are projects like that, Nostr is a great example I can think of, but they are notoriously unmoderated and therefore not condusive to the kind of discussions and content seen here or even on mainstream social media. You need moderation or else the intolerant will drive all the nice people away. Since anyone can start a server there needs to be control over federation otherwise the timeline would be flooded with bigoted shit, spambots, gore, and unmarked-NSFW.
Mastodon not fetching a user’s old posts when you first follow them is also a huge annoyance if you’re using a smaller server.
I did find that is quite annoying and I definitely feel like that should be fixed somehow, like give the option to fetch their older posts.
I managed to do it by finding a server which had them, following my account on that server, then boosing them in chronological order, and shortly unboosting them after. That push federates the content onto the server, but you need another account on an adjacent server or in worst case, the original one to do that, and it might not make people too happy (the people on dragonchat.org are cool but you might not have the same experience on other servers).
This discussion definitely needs to happen. I am not on the fediverse since very long so maybe that already exists, but it could be good to have some sort of “canary” on instances that let everyone knows who defederated from whom and when.
Dialog is a good thing. I asked about lemmy/yiffit, because that is where I have been spending my time, to not expect general fediverse issues to be discussed would be naive.
If your instance is the defederator, you can at least search, if its the other way, I don’t know that there is a built in way you can see it. Maybe you could try to fetch something at some interval and have a notification when that starts to fail. You would never really know that hundreds of voices just became silent.
Any instance with a hidden blocklist
Yeah it should be more widely known that those in particular are best avoided. Looking at the list of who they’ve blocked is the only reliable way we have to quickly learn something meaningful about the quality of an instance. That minimal level of transparency is not too much to ask.
The other problem I’m having with lemmy/kbin/mbin at the moment is that federation seems extremely unreliable, and I’m commenting here in part just to see if this actually gets through to your instance. (Looks like it did.) Usenet was much better at it 35 years ago.
Now that we’re officially outside their sphere of influence, I can say this:
I have serious concerns with the moderation decisions made by Mastodon.art.
To put it far more politely than I actually feel.
