rglullis comments on Is the Fediverse stalling?

Is the Fediverse stalling? (lemmy.relayeasy.com)

submitted 1 year ago by 3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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I'm genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)

[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 1 year ago (15 children)

What’s stopping small businesses and influencers

There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:

Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.
There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them "hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon".
Every and any effort to build a public searchable index of the Fediverse was attacked on the grounds of "I don't want my data used by marketers".
The majority view on "how to best fund the Fediverse" is "set up donations". Whenever I bring up "I think it's more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members", I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

What reporters?

There were a number of reporters from the NYT/WSJ/CNN who set up Mastodon accounts in 2022 and were harassed on Mastodon.

Does this, by the way, not depend on the instance?

Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 1 year ago (13 children)

There is nothing stopping them, but there is no one here that wants them to come:

People don't really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.

Scroll around for a bit on the federated timeline of your preferred Mastodon instance, tell me how long it takes for someone to display an anti-business sentiment.

So here do you just mean "people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists"?

There is no one coordinated movement to get creators on YouTube and tell them "hey, if you start putting your videos on PeerTube we will contribute to your Patreon".

Oh, well I don't know enough about Peertubes success here. I don't really use that.

The majority view on "how to best fund the Fediverse" is "set up donations". Whenever I bring up "I think it's more fair if everyone paid just a little bit, this is why my instance is only for paying members", I am immediately treated as an evil capitalist pig.

Oh for goodness sake. I simply don't believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.

Do you think that Fediverse is a good representation of the overall political spectrum?

Not really. So? Neither are major reddit subreddits in many cases.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I feel like we are talking about different things. You seem to be more focused on Reddit vs Lemmy, and I am talking about the "Closed" social networks vs the wider Fediverse.

People don’t really respond well to advertisements and influencers on Reddit either, for context.

The comparison is not to Reddit. It's Instagram/TikTok/YouTube. Maybe you heard of those: it's a place where WNBA players making $100k/year by playing can make $20k per Instagram sponsored post.

people tend to be democratic socialists/communists/anarchists”?

First, lumping together all these three ideologies as one single block is a bit handwavy. Second, I am not talking about "anti-corporate". I'm talking about anti-business. If you think that the majority of people are that extreme in their political positions, I'd guess your worldview is quite skewed.

I simply don’t believe that a paywalled system as you imagine could ever even approach Reddits numbers, or even Blueskys.

This is a strawman: I'm saying "We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going", which is not the same as "all instances should be paywalled".

I think if we didn't have as many open instances, we'd end up with more people self-hosting and running a server for their own friends, or we would start hearing from students asking their universities to run a server for them, or we would get hyper-localized instances where some group would pool resources to run a service for themselves, etc.

are major reddit subreddits in many cases.

Again, it's not just about reddit. Also, it's about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

Sorry, I'm thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don't really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.

This is a strawman: I'm saying "We should not have to rely on open registration instances and hope that the admins get enough funds to keep going", which is not the same as "all instances should be paywalled".

If Piefed (or Lemmy) brings in effective community migration where an entire community can be lifted from one instance to another, then I am not bothered by future lemm.ee scenarios happening. Communities can become nomadic, and that's fine.

Again, it's not just about reddit. Also, it's about having places where politics are not such a proeminent part of the discussion. E.g, Threads got a lot of their initial momentum by avoiding politics and getting sports journalists to post about NBA and football.

That's on people needing to do that. You don't need to convince me of that. I'm doing it with music and TV. People have to be the change they want to see. But there's not really anything anyone can do about that with regards to how the audience here interact, or how much interest they have in things outside of politics.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 point 1 year ago (10 children)

Sorry, I’m thinking strictly in terms of Reddit vs. Lemmy/Piefed/adjacent networks because they are essentially Reddit alternatives that function the same. I don’t really know much about Mastodon or other alternative networks, nor can I speak on their health - but the lemmyverse (including new piefed instances) seem to be fine overall.

From Evan, co-author of ActivityPub: The Fediverse should be more like the Facebook Platform (lots of client apps using the same social graph) rather than the Apple App Store (a bunch of one-feature apps that have to bootstrap their own social network each time).

Instead of thinking "Lemmy/Piefed vs Reddit" or "Mastodon vs Bluesky vs Twitter" or "PeerTube vs Youtube", think that the Fediverse can be so much more than a poor man's version of the proprietary networks. This mentality is still rooted in the silos created by Big Tech.

Communities can become nomadic, and that’s fine.

First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.

Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it's easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures. People have expectations set by the corporate networks, so the whole system needs to be as reliable as them.

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

First, I think that community migration implementation from PieFed has very bad implications. It is literally rewriting history.

I don't really care about that. If the idea of communities being effectively modular becomes an accepted standard, then no-one will blink an eye at their posts on a prior community being redirected after the fact to another instance.

Second, if we want to make the Fediverse something really accessible, it needs to be a lot more reliable. Yeah, when we are a few thousand people it's easy to coordinate the migration of a few dozen communities. But if we are talking about millions or billions of people, we can not afford to have constant failures.

We don't have constant failures though? What are you referring to here? Lemm.ee crashed out due to owner/admins burnout. That's the only major one i can think of.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 point 1 year ago (8 children)

I don't really care about that.

I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.

One of the fundamental issues with the current implementations in the Fediverse is that the server owns the keys and can do anything on behalf of the user.

That's the only major one i can think of.

again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.

but if you want to talk threadverse only: feddit.de. The original kbin, fmhy, one for writers that I forgot the name...

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.

Then we're at an impasse. But communities becoming completely modular and movable solves the problems you speak of. That's the answer.

again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.

Because I don't really care or know that much about Mastodon.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 point 1 year ago (6 children)

That's the answer.

That's a bad, short-sighted, wrong answer. We can have decentralized identifiers. We have more than a couple FEPs that deal with portable objects correctly, and in the last FediForum there was a lot proposed strategies to allow migrations from both dead and live servers. None of them requires a server to unilaterally steal the content from another actor and pass it as their own.

People were criticizing me like hell because of the mirror bots on alien.top, but at least the bots were stealing from Reddit and they were meant to get people to migrate. This is implementation from PieFed may have good intentions, but the will lead to bad outcomes.

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I don't think an admin of a server would think that if a community sets up there and operates there that they "own" it, to be honest.

Also, currently, it would only duplicate the content and change how it appears from a Piefed instance.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

If you are the admin and developer of the server, you can do pretty much anything with it.

For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.

For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?

I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn't be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually,

No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.

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[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

I'd object and probably complain and it'd get your instance blacklisted. I'd support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.

But this isn't quite the way that community migration would work here - it's not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I'm not - whereas I'm talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.

If I posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn't really object to that.

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 point 1 year ago

You see, this is why it's important to understand that how ActivityPub works and why we can not think only in terms of "Reddit, but federated".

In terms of ActivityPub, a community that mirrors posts is exactly the same as someone that "retweets" a message. You may not even have realized, but it's quite possible that your posts/comments have been replicated on mastodon. Now that they are (finally) adding support for quote-posts, this will be even more common.

What I just described to you is this "communities following communities" idea. It's not about "giving the impression" of anything, it would be openly to aggregate all content in one single place and to avoid fragmentation.

Now, like I said in the linked discussion, I think that there is a legitimate complaint about taking content from one place and just moving it around. But at least the approach I am proposing is not fabricating anything. It's Piefed's implementation that is falsifying information. In my view, what PieFed is doing is objectively worse than a "reposting actor". Just like the "private voting" feature, it is beneficial for its own users but it's bad for the overall Fediverse.