Fediverse

Mastondon does allow you to export your profiles and set them up on a different instance; I reckon some folks will figure out a solution on how to easily jump ship.

I've been online for close to 30 years now.

I've lost count of the number of forums I've had to leave because they went to shit.

I always find another one.

That's why we need to decentralize. If there's 100 communities over 50 servers, then it doesn't matter which website goes down or defederates. It's only if everyone stays on one or two instances that the fediverse breaks.

Over on mastodon, big instances have gone down, people notice but it isnt the end of the world.

@Guy_Fieris_Hair I doubt that lemmy.ml or lemmy as a whole would sell-out to Facebook as they are Tankies.

I feel there will at some point be a "this is why we can't have nice things" moment with ActivityPub and Federation in general.

Karma is probably pretty easy to farm using fake home servers or botted accounts, and other kinds spam is probably going to be an issue if this platform reaches any level of mainstream popularity.

I think many parallels can be drawn between ActivityPub and E-mail, here. E-mail works, but not without a lot of gatekeeping, blocking and spam. Its really hard not to get blocked as a self hosted email server today, you are probably going to be mostly blocked by default until you build somewhat of a reputation for your server, etc. I foresee similar levels of maintenance being needed in the future in order to keep servers federated.

As far as moving your account, some things are easier than others to deal with. Things such as subscriptions and likes is probably a lot easier to move to a new account than entire post histories and such.

What would selling out to Meta look like?

I wonder if there could be a universal subscribed communities + followed users data format people could export before they move instances. Hard part would be getting everyone to use it

Popular pieces of software that's part of the fediverse usually give you either:

1. Export options - manual export options intended for GDPR-Compliance and peace of mind
2. Account Move options - Mastodon is best known for this, as you can migrate your profile (but not your posts and followers) to another instance. Anyone which then visits your old page will have it blurred out, linking to your new one.

#2 could be expanded in the case of Kbin and Lemmy to also include subscribed communities/magazines, settings and some other things where Federation allows for it.

It is really strange, in that it WORKS like the old Wild West of Web 2.0 when it was all blogs and RSS feeds but it doesn't FEEL like the Wild West. It's definitely civilization here.

agreed. It’s got bugs, and scalability issues, but i’m liking to “quirkiness” of it. I’ve most most of my stuff to the fediverse so far. It’ll need a lot more polishing to attract mainstream attention, but it’s nice to have this option.

Mastodon is a bit more polished than Lemmy/kbin, although is still missing some important features.

But the really important thing to remember is that the maintainers of Fediverse platforms will be continuing to make things better for users (overall), while Reddit/Twitter/Facebook will continue to make things worse for users (overall). In the long run, the Fediverse will be way better for users than the corporate platforms.

Realcaseyrollins was on this part of the fediverse for a long time, he routinely posts really decent stuff. He has a lot of posts on communities on narwhal.city that can be federated back here.

It’s the digital equivalent of off-grid living. I love how much useful tooling I can host myself on my little cluster, and it is empowering that $megacorp can’t hold it hostage or shove hostile tracking and advertising everywhere. The Fedeverse feels much closer to the spirit of the internet in its infancy.