It's doing this at the instance level rather than the user level which is the problem. The long-term result of that is a few large instances that default-block smaller instances, so then people switch from the smaller instances to the larger ones that aren't blocked, creating new instances becomes unviable and the market concentrates into an oligopoly susceptible to capture by ideologues.
There’s a similar issue with server priority and federating too. At least last I saw, maybe a year ago.
Eg if I run a small server I have a difficult time getting my updates federated quickly because other servers have a lot of fire hoses to manage. You end up low on the priority list and less likely to be seen. In my experience from last I tried, at least.
> It’s always at the instance level. They own the machine.
The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint. If you want to block someone, you block them, or delegate it to someone in a way that you can later change at no switching cost to yourself.
> The difference between federated networks and decentralized networks is that the main control is with node operators vs cryptographic key holders.
Fully decentralized networks have to solve a difficult technical problem: If your device is offline, who is hosting your stuff? How do you make it fast and reliable?
Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way. Instead of your stuff being hosted nowhere, each person gets to pick, which can and should be independent of any moderation or other considerations. The benefit, and goal, of federation here should be to make the hosting node a fungible commodity.
You can also federate moderation by, for example, choosing a moderator who publishes a block list that you can subscribe to.
But these two things should not be linked together. Doing so is a mistake. As many things of this nature should be made separate as possible and with the lowest achievable switching costs, to inhibit forces that tend toward market concentration.
Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another, not when there are four that are significantly isolated from one another and you need state-level resources to spin up a fifth.
> The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint. If you want to block someone, you block them, or delegate it to someone in a way that you can later change at no switching cost to yourself.
Why would you force the provider to support objectionable (for them) content? It makes sense for the instance to be aligned with its users on moderation rules.
> The benefit, and goal, of federation here should be to make the hosting node a fungible commodity.
Communities aren't fungible! And your insistence on having federation completely seamless will result in "what's the point anyway, let's centralize it, more efficient"
> The point is that there shouldn't be any "the" machine for users to get locked into as a chokepoint
You’re, again, looking for a decentralized system.
> Federation solves that by hosting your stuff on an always-on server somewhere, which you get to choose and should be able to trivially switch at any time without affecting your social graph or account name or who is blocked by anybody in any way
Yes, the ability to change home servers is missing from mastodon.
But even if they had such a feature, the content you see and likely your ability to change servers would be controlled by your instance owner because they literally own the machine your data lives on and which serves you content.
This is the defining quality of a federated network vs a decentralized one.
> Federation works when there are thousands of federated instances that integrate seamlessly with one another
I don’t think this is a useful definition as it also fits decentralized systems.
Federated networks are networks where independent instances of compatible software are able to exchange information without being owned by a single entity (think email, mastodon, lemmy, etc)
Most instance block types in Mastodon affect the "public feeds"/"shared community" on an instance, but allow individual users to follow users on "blocked" instances in their own feeds.
User decision making is still very much an entrenched thing.
Most decision making on blocks in small-to-medium instances is democratic, in my experience, with users voting on them together. Also, as pointed out there's the obvious "vote with your feet" of switching to a different instance if you don't agree with its policies and/or how other instances don't agree with its policies.
There's definitely a risk of large instances trying to strong arm smaller instances with blocks and/or threats of blocks. But so far it's more a philosophical risk than a real risk from what I've seen. At least in my parts of the Fediverse small instances are "the norm" and it's is more likely the blocks are against the larger instances because with size they are more likely to allow spam registrations, they are more likely to have users that don't respect cultural norms like CWs or Alt text/Image Descriptions and don't feel a need to respect them because their mods won't enforce them, or yes they set up an ideologue as a mod/admin and shift to a gross direction. As a "telegraph network between a lot of small villages that mostly ignore the big cities", ActivityPub can be rather nice.
Why is everyone required to federate with everyone on ActivityPub? What if I want to only see Wordpress, Peertube, and Pixelfed content but nothing from Mastodon or Lemmy? How is that problematic as an ActivityPub client? Or I only want Spanish language content?
Because otherwise social graphs and organic exchanges don't work. I'm not joining a Mastodon server to passively consume curated collection of serfs owned by benevolent server admins offer. Yet, that's the model of users and communities in Mastodon as it is.
Is there any kind of social media that doesn’t become a serfdom in your opinion? I mean Hacker News falls under that definition as well yet here you are consuming a curated feed.
I don’t understand the question. You are currently using one of the most heavily moderated sites on the internet complaining that another platform which allows individuals to create their own clients which to view content published on the protocol has servers that you are not required to use that are too moderated?
I'm expecting random person to reply to my comments here, and expect my reply to yours shown to you. I don't expect* others to be on a blocked sub-cluster of HN server that my comments would not show or someone else's response to be removed from my sight.
in practice that's not the kind of content that is defederated. what is defederated is usually for ideological reasons, but sometimes it's because of illegal content (there's a lot of Japanese Misskey instances that will happily federate images to you that are questionably legal to possess in the US whether you want them on your drive or not) or out of spam control / distrust (small instances often have trouble federating)
ironically when I used Mastodon, while dealing with these issues, I was unable to filter out other languages. So in addition to extremely questionable content, a lot of it was simply in another language.
ActivityPub is a really half baked protocol and the sooner we realize that and move on from it the better. Personally, I didn't feel that defederation was an adequate defense against those MissKey instances and I decided running an instance is a very big liability.
I guess I just have a unicorn of an instance because I never see these issues. Yes there is a large list of servers defederated but many of them are at best 4chan tier content which I can easily find on 4chan no need for my mastodon feed to have everything under the sun on it.
Like I get that moving instances or between applications isn’t really possible on AP and there is concerns with moderation and so on but it’s been the best internet experience I’ve had. It’s a bubble but I easily just come here or to 4chan or reddit to see outside that bubble.
The second largest Mastodon instance is Chinese, third and fourth Japanese, fifth NSFW exclusive. Third and fourth combined is 32% larger than the first, fourth also has about 4x more post per user(~49 vs ~195). The list I'm referring does not include Misskey-based systems(also APub based).
Defederation is not a huge issue if you assume and embrace a segregationist view and cut off likely major fractions of the organically formed Fediverse out of itself. After all it's porn and scripts you don't even recognize, what's the point in having them? My insistence is, that's a fresh dead canary in cage.
If I want a feed of 100 people who post statuses/tweets, blogs, videos, and pictures who I am interested in and by using ActivityPub can use a single client to view all this activity, is that by your definition segregationist and a dead canary?
I don’t understand how if I host my own AP client on my own hardware and choose only to federate and subscribe with a small subset of sites and people who post using AP that this is a bad thing. I can use other websites like Hacker News to see other opinions and views.