Context: Technology Connections is a YouTuber https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections
This is his account on Mastodon https://mas.to/@TechConnectify
I agree!!!
Speaking of critique, this reply thread on Mastodon by him is probably worth reading (regardless whether you agree or not) https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
Sorry, try this one https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/113056731556590285
Honestly, this suggests to me that the ability to defederate might be a bug rather than a feature.
If my instance doesn’t talk to the instance at foobar.example, I might be unable to see (parts of) relevant discussions. This is worse for a microblog like Mastodon than it is in the threadiverse but it’s still something to keep in mind even over here. And most non-enthusiasts don’t want to have to do that.
Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it barely has defederation support. But in general all mail servers can talk to all other mail servers as long as they provide the right look-at-me-I’m-legitimate signaling. That makes email easy to use for regular people no matter if they use Gmail or their cousin’s self-hosted mail server.
Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work… However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It’s a tricky problem.
Couldn’t disagree more.
The simple fact of the matter is, the fediverse is local. Everything you interact with is locally hosted on whichever website you’re using. That means, if I’m running Mastodon or Lemmy on my website, I’m platforming everyone who has contact with my website.
And I’m not going to want to platform a lot of people. I’m not going to want to pay to host their posts. I’m not going to want to deal with dealing with other websites who refuse to moderate their instance, and who refuse to take out their trash. Suggesting that people should be forced to is how you ensure that people don’t run ActivityPub enabled websites at all, and you reduce the fediverse to a semi-centralized family of, like, 5 big websites, and a thousand Nazi troll instances that become too much work to deal with.
There is less of defederation in the email network, because mail has been build to reach its destination no matter the path or the time, message must arrives even partially. (this was a premise of the US military, at ARPAnet). Even if a mailadmin blocks one server, mail could go another route. This is also the base of the internet, path is not the most straight forward direct link between source and destination (companies are usually against this structure)
AT or Mastodon don’t have this freedom or constraint (depend of one point of view).
Couldn’t disagree with you more, the thing about federation is that it isn’t viewing the content on the server it was posted on, it is crossposting it to all other federated servers. That means you are when federating remote content you are literally platforming it. That also means you are liable for it if it’s objectionable or illegal content. So being able to not accept those crossposts is important. Honestly defederation and limited federation are not as big of issues as you and others think they are, you can ignore the majority of the defederated servers and it’ll be fine, the issue comes when people want the world and aren’t entitles to have it, like I said in my other comment.
Email is an example of a successful federated platform and it barely has defederation support.
You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.
Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.
Perhaps that is how at least the non-threaded fediverse should work… However, that would also mean that some instance hosting heinous shit would keep being visible to everyone. It’s a tricky problem.
You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.
You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.
Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.
I’ve been using a self-administered mail server (running on a root server at a major hosting provider) as my main email provider for well over a decade. I think I’ve encountered one website where that actually led to issues. Heck, the server once got on Spamhaus’s bad side for a week and once we were off the list everything was back to normal.
Self-hosted mail works very well one you’ve jumped through all of the appropriate hoops (DKIM, SPF, etc.). Sure, running a mail server out of your bedroom probably won’t work very well but if you’re with any kind of reputable hosting provider you should be fine.
You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.
The problem is that defederation leads to confusing situations. Being told about a response to your post/comment/toot and then finding nothing when you look is bad UX. Better UX would be a notice that what you’re looking for comes from a defederated instance and can’t be viewed – but that’s obviously impossible because your instance doesn’t even know anything is there.
Not wanting all the content on your instance is perfectly reasonable. But the way defederation works exposes details of the underlying technology to the user in a way many users don’t want to have to deal with, serving as an impediment to growing the fediverse.
It’s not easy to keep unwanted stuff off your instance while also being user-friendly about it. That’s why I called it tricky.
This is what I have been thinking!!! Defederation is THE WORST feature of fediverse, and trust me, it will keep people away from joining the fediverse.
I just remembered that a year ago some artist I really liked joined Mastodon. I tried following it through my old account on kbin.social but somehow it doesn’t work, no clear error message. After asking around I figured it out: turns out said Mastodon instance defederated from kbin.social, with no valid reason given!!
Because of shit like this, no wonder people–including tech-savvy person like me–are confused of choosing the right instance of Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. It’s what makes the onboarding experience of Mastodon awful. It’s what makes Mastodon losing users, IMO.
On the off chance that you are not joking (or worse, trolling), that is very much the fault of Ernst, the Kbin.social instance admin, for having abandoned the instance that he created for months at a time and allowing spam to flood the entire Fediverse through that server. He had multiple extenuating circumstances, which he profusely apologized for, but aside from that I don’t blame other instances from defederating with it in the slightest. I also still have an account there, and I too have not been able to access the website in about a year, and I too have blocked the entire instance, bc it was virtually the sole source of all of the spam that I was getting across all of Lemmy.
You can read more about it here: https://pawb.social/post/2658114 (original).
I did not downvote your comment here, but I will say please don’t be so eager to spread misinformation on the Fediverse. I found the above link simply by clicking the circle button and searching for the phrase “Kbin.social”, and I even confirmed that you are able to do so on your instance. Leaving the default sorting options in place, this was the 4th hit and the 1st one that immediately jumps out upon human inspection of the titles as being the most highly relevant.
You will do as you please ofc, and people will learn to ignore / block you as a result if necessary, and only very very rarely someone may attempt to correct you (at least in a gentle manner:-) as I’m trying to do here, and as I would have wanted done for me. But if you correct yourself before speaking, then others don’t have to go to that trouble, and your words will carry more weight. I offer this as food for thought anyway.:-)
I wasn’t trolling, my response was geniune and I was disappointed. My comment wasn’t clear, please don’t take it the wrong way.
This was when kbin.social was REALLY active. IIRC probably around June 2023? When Ernest was still active maintaining the kbin.social instance. The Mastodon instance I was talking about is mastodon.art. And if I search around, I’m still right that the instance seems to REALLY like to defederate without valid reason, I will link some thread that talks about this below [1].
I wrote about the detail of this in kbin.social, but kbin.social is no longer active so I’ll admit I kind of forgot the detail.
As far as I remember the reasoning stated in mastodon.art federation status is that “right wing” or something along that, at the time. I knew at that time that was wrong. I don’t really care about right wing or left wing (I am just a Southeast Asian, that dichotomy of politics is kinda unrelatable to me, but that’s topic for another time). But kbin.social was definitely not “right wing”, in fact it was one of the “leftist” place I’ve seen on the internet.
Even then, the reasoning feels kinda off to me, other than the fact that it wasn’t true, why would you defederate instance over difference of opinion? If the instance was spamming your agenda to your instance then it’s probably justifiable. But it clearly wasn’t at the time. [2]
And regarding “keeping people away from fediverse”, I was talking about the UX of fediverse.
That time, I wanted to follow someone from mastodon.art as said person is an artist I really like that was disappointed with Twitter and trying out several alternative social medias. Somehow they chose to join mastodon.art. I was happy and wanted to follow said artist. I tried following them but I remember I had a hard time doing so.
Turns out my instance was defederated.
At this point, I’m sure most non-tech-savvy user would have given up. But I still tried following it anyway. I tried creating mastodon.art account, and, it turns out, mastodon.art sign up requires approval. At that point, I kinda given up. It’s gonna take lots of time until it gets approved, so why bother?
The admin behavior somehow actually made me doubt that I will get approved too (though to be fair, it ended up being approved). And then, why would I use the mastodon.art account, when the instance is defederate-happy, making it actually hard to discover another artist to follow (in an app that already have some problem with discoverability)?
Since then I started using less and less fediverse. I was kind of annoyed by this experience.
Defederation perhaps is necessary.
But it is prone to abuse by admins. And that degrades user’s experience.
https://beehaw.org/post/6853561 , https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/4695219 ↩︎
Going off topic for a minute, this is yet another part that I don’t like about some folks in the fediverse. It seems similar to my observation of US domestic politics. They just want to stay in their own bubble and doesn’t want to compromise and hang out with people with different opinion. That isn’t how I was taught to live. I hang out with people with different beliefs–be it religion, politics, ethnics groups, etc-- all the time. These kinds of behavior made it hard to have some actual discussion. Those people lacks nuance. ↩︎
I’ve been looking for a new instance to join due to various reasons. Ended up setting up and account somewhere and spending 2 hours manually copying over various settings only to find my Moshidon client won’t even connect with that new instance. Normal people are just going to quit when that happens.
Lemmy.World (LW) is a nice place: ~80% of the entire Fediverse is there, and it has some of the best communities and least trouble connecting with those communities of all instances.
On the other hand, using LW goes against the entire spirit of decentralization that is one of the primary hallmarks of the Fediverse. So I definitely agree that you may want to explore some additional options. If you are adamant about being defederated from nothing, some instances to look at include Lemm.ee (the #3 largest instance after LW and lemmynsfw.com, see https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list for more, and for best results sort by Active Users) or lemmy.today. The #4 instance sh.itjust.works is also quite nice I hear. #6 Hexbear.net is a troll instance and while #5 lemmy.ml pretends to be leftist it is actually tankie (I hate that term as it is pejorative, but they really truly do deny that the Tiananmen Square massacre actually happened, as in that anyone actually died in it, so it does fit). You may want to find a regional instance, like Discuss.Online is in the USA, or a language one like feddit.org is a German/English mix, or a themed one like Lemmy.zip is for “tech, PCs, and gaming”. Pay attention to the uptime stats, that’s an important one for me. Maybe for an app that can grab content in a manner that doesn’t always have to be live it could be less so?
Btw in the future, while I have never heard of that app name, in the webpage UI you can go to Settings -> Import/Export Settings “Import and export your account settings as JSON”. Choose Export, and then wherever you want to set up a new (perhaps an Alt?) account choose Import and give it that file. Messages sent to your old account will not follow you, i.e. there is no way to set up forwarding yet, but at least your community subscriptions and block lists will be transferred. Even if you have to do this once from the web UI, this will definitely affect whatever app you use after that.:-)
Oh wow this is a lot. I should have just made a post about this - maybe I will!?:-P
