I'm not sure I agree that infosec costs would scale with number of users. Your tech stack is either vulnerable or it's not. A larger server would mean you're more of a desirable target, but a small server (which "ideally" every server would be) would still have those same vulnerabilities.

And servers need to be cost effective. Not everyone can afford to run a server out of the good of their heart, and those that are able to do that are already preselected to be fairly wealthy. So yes, even in a decentralized system money will always win.

but rather to ensure the instance is cushioned against unforeseen events and cost increases.

100% availability would be nice, but there are trade-offs. Concentrated power on LW is a bad trade. Defeats the problem activitypub was meant to address.

Instances that can be expected to last beyond the short-term to medium-term should be backed by a non-profit organization with commitments to users to remove key man risk.

Sure, stability is good, so long as the instance does not sell souls to Cloudflare or grow disproportionately big.

Even under the scenario of full data portability, switching instances creates confusion (particularly for casual users who just want to create an account and not worry about whether it will still exist in a year) and breaks @ mention links, so safeguards to reduce the risk of instance failure outweigh the downsides of reduced decentralization.

Data portability is not at odds with decentralization. It’s the other way around. A good degree of data portability promotes decentralization precisely because disaster can be mitigated when small intances fall.

Or are you calling centralization the “safeguard”? What a horrible trade to make. The right answer is better software, not centralization.

Given that the software is being developed by literal communists and isn’t in the hands of the Lemmy.world operators, I don’t think limited centralization is likely to lead to user base exploitation or a particularly strong network effect.

Look at the numbers. Network effect is in full force. Lemmy.world (Cloudflare centralized) is huge, an order of magnitude bigger than the 2nd biggest (sh.itjust.works IIRC, also Cloudflare). Dev.lemmy.ml was the biggest originally, and also Cloudflared to enable unhealthy growth. The devs wisdom improved and they scaled back deliberately. Now lemmy.ml is no longer centralized on Cloudflare (which was quite an embarrassment for founders of an activitypub implementation) and much smaller than LW (though still more than 2 std deviations bigger than the mean).

If an LW admin does not like what you write, you lose reach to a large portion of the fedi because of 1 person’s influence. Fuck convenience; esp. when convenience comes with Reddit-like power abuses.

Money wins, unless the tech is done well.

It would be good, but not for the bottom line. Facebook has mastered the bottom line indeed.

The point in more users leading to a healthy revenue wouldn't be to support a profit-seeking company—something that many users are specifically here to avoid—but rather to ensure the instance is cushioned against unforeseen events and cost increases. Instances that can be expected to last beyond the short-term to medium-term should be backed by a non-profit organization with commitments to users to remove key man risk.

Even under the scenario of full data portability, switching instances creates confusion (particularly for casual users who just want to create an account and not worry about whether it will still exist in a year), eliminates the archive of content on the shuttered instance that will no longer federate, and breaks @ mention links, so safeguards to reduce the risk of instance failure outweigh the downsides of reduced decentralization.

Given that the software is being developed by literal communists and isn't in the hands of the Lemmy.world operators, I don't think limited centralization is likely to lead to user base exploitation or a particularly strong network effect.

w/a iow

what are you doing with all the time you’re saving?

Ultimately instances with more users are better able to collect donations and reduce per-user monthly costs,

Everyone has their reasons for defending centralization. For you it is cost savings, apparently. Money wins, unless the tech is done well.

(edit) Small instances are cheaper to secure because they are less prone to targeting. The bigger an instance gets, the more it costs per user for infosec.

it also wouldn’t be good to have them spread out evenly across 1,000 instances.

It would be good, but not for the bottom line. Facebook has mastered the bottom line indeed.

Without a mechanism for user data to be completely transferred between instances (including post and voting history), an instance shutting down is a terrible experience for new users that could encourage them to return to a commercial social media network and must thus be avoided at all costs.

It’s a problem for sure. Lemmy devs are pro-data portability, but they give it a low priority. They hope that someone will build a bot that ports data so long as it does not require Lemmy server code to be written. IOW, they (Nutomic specifically) calls for a hack job. He posts pseudocode here: https://lemmy.ml/post/31128657/19022698

Ultimately instances with more users are better able to collect donations and reduce per-user monthly costs, so while it would be better if Lemmy.world didn't have quite such a high proportion of the userbase, it also wouldn't be good to have them spread out evenly across 1,000 instances. Without a mechanism for user data to be completely transferred between instances (including post and voting history), an instance shutting down is a terrible experience for new users that could encourage them to return to a commercial social media network and must thus be avoided at all costs.

Bingo. It’s people going where the people are. Which is the reason people often give for migrating to lemmy.world and mastodon.social.

The network effect is a term that applies to social group retention, not merely the dominant role a company plays in an industry.

Please don't abbreviate "with" as "w/".

When Piefed emerged, it was extremely sluggish in my browser and I got the impression that it was lightweight on the server side due to exporting a lot of the work onto the client side. That could be wrong or perhaps it evolved more. That comparison suggests I should have another look.

First of all, you didn’t answer the questions.

But I will answer yours:

Why do people fear downvotes so much?

This is irrelevant and already addressed in Lemmy. Lemmy already has a disable downvotes config option. Beehaw is an example of where that is used. Anyone who outright opposes¹ downvotes can use beehaw.

Silent downvotes are a different matter entirely. There is good reason to oppose silent downvotes. They are a suppressive act that lacks justification, heavily manipulated, and adds negative value and toxicity.

Re: toxicity -- silent downvotes are also an assault on dignity as they regard the OP as unworthy of explanation. Then there is the further side-effect of the OP being denied the viewpoint of a (cowardly) opposition and ultimately being denied understanding of the community they are in, which is not conducive to future positive content.

It’s ultimately shitty communication. Like when a bank’s way of communicating to you that your ID card expired on file is to freeze your account. Or when in Office Space they communicate to Marvin he is fired by fixing a payroll glitch. It’s that kind of communication that’s shitty. Bizarre how people actually think this is a sensible way to communicate in a civilised society.

If you don’t like the downvotes, you can use a sorting algorithm that ignores them.

There is no sorting algo that disregards silent downvotes while counting reasoned downvotes.

Also, the power of defaults is a thing. The suppression has effect because of default algos used by the unmeticulous masses. One’s own custom sorting algo could not make a dent in that even if it were magically feasible from the user’s view to associate upvotes to downvotes.

¹ I don’t outright oppose downvotes, but when our blunt options are the default shit-show we have by default or no downvotes, no downvotes is better which is why I use beehaw.

Downvote is the wrong tool for spam.

Also: spam is so rare in comparison to other downvoted content that in the off chance that the proper tool falls short, of course you can unsilently downvote the spam for the greater good. But as well, when you trigger “report spam” functionality, that is engagement. The server could of course cast a downvote in that circumstance while awaiting moderator action. That would be the most sensible of course.

Why do people fear downvotes so much? Let people add their votes to whatever is in their feeds.

If you don't like the downvotes, you can use a sorting algorithm that ignores them. Otherwise, they are a general indicator of how people feel about content on Lemmy, and that's not entirely useless data

It's questionable as it is that being banned from a community means you can't vote on the content at an instance level.

This is an older article so unsure if still relevant:
https://join.piefed.social/2024/02/09/comparing-network-utilization-of-lemmy-kbin-and-piefed/

So we should engage in a comment so we can downvote spam?

This setting:

Clear cookies and site data when you close all windows

is true. I’m not sure what site data is involved there but I’ll try flipping that switch to false. I also reject 3rd party cookies but I don’t suppose that matters.

Did you mess with cache settings by chance

When a published “scientific study” that uses derogation like the “tankie”, I wonder why a publication would accept it or neglect to at least tag it with some kind of warning about bias.

Moreover, the second most active community, c/genzedong, further solidifies Lemmygrad.ml’s role as a Reddit alternative for tankies.

There is a bit of irony here because the research is about toxicity and insult.

I’m not going to read further despite being curious about how they make a backwards attribution of anti-Ukraine to left-wing. It’s the right-wing conservatives who tend to love Russia or at least convey the most tolerance. And Russians tend to align with US right-wing movements and politicians. Liberals support Ukraine.

Omg 🤣🤣🤣

Absolutely, it's produced by INFOWARS writers. Deeply unserious.

Plus the methodology is rubbish and conflates antizionism with antisemitism, and look who funded it. This is the epitome of confirmation bias and the study authors and peer reviewers should be censured, at the very least.

This is incorrect, both regarding the political structure of the USSR, and regarding the left/right divide.

For starters, the USSR had strong localized democracy. It was also a planned economy, as is the basis of the Marxist conception of socialism. Workers formed soviets, or worker's councils, and these laddered up from the local level all the way up to the supreme soviet. In this manner, production was collectivized and run along a common plan. Those at the top of society were on average 10 times wealthier than those on the bottom, as compared to hundreds to millions range for feudalism and capitalism.

Secondly, the left/right divide is about social relations to the means of production. Leftism is generally about collectivized ownership and production, and rightism is about private ownership. The USSR was a publicly owned and run economy, and while it certainly had flaws and struggles, was unquestionably on the left. An example of a right-wing economy with a small, priveledged elite would be the US, or the Republic of Korea, under the control of the chaebol.

Overall, Marxism-Leninism is the most widely adopted and successful tendency within Marxism, and Marxism itself is one of the two largest umbrellas in leftism, the other being anarchism.

On this we agree.

I hate anyone that calls Marxist/Lenninists "left wing" with a straight face...

If we're only going to care about a single axis, making it "economic" already makes zero sense, but Marxists/Leninists lie about that. The USSR was controlled by a small group of ultra wealthy party members, that's not fucking communism.

If we're only going to care about one axis, it's freedom on the left, and authoritarianism on the right.

And Lenin was as far right as he thought he could get away with.