How do you understand federation?
How do you understand federation?
I don’t really want a definition of what the fediverse should be or was initially envisioned to be. I just want to understand how people actually use it. I started wondering because I felt the talks about its current state and growth stumble in invisible misunderstandings about the basic nature of what we are using or how we are using it.
I came here with the reddit exodus, but the site was mostly utilitarian for me, with my attempts to find community a failure. I saw something forum like and treated it like that, and the same can be said about my use of beehaw. Only recently I adventured in seeing a feed with All displayed, which was definitely not for me, but helped me find some communities to subscribe.
Federation, personally, is an opportunity for different communities to communicate, not necessarily get conjoined. For instance, I have an account in tech.lgbt, although it’s abandoned. In this group x.y, I focused first in the lgbt, as I have being doing since much before I saw myself as queer, because it’s a very good way to make sure the people around are the kind I wish to have around as a start. That’s my home, a place in which I expect visitors to respect the rules if they want to be let in. That’s to say I believe there’s no public / communal space in the fediverse, you are always on someone’s home and should respect that.
The big issue I’d find with the fediverse is that we don’t advertise the outside communities we enjoy enough, mostly expecting something interesting to simply show up on our screens.
For me fediverse seems to be the answer to the current state of social media. The modern internet is big. Participation in the big things and an audience are a barrier of entry for competing services to rise up and replace the giant social media juggernauts that rose up in the late 00s and early 10s.
Granularity was actually a strength of reddit. The default subs on reddit and threads that hit /r/all have been bad for more than a decade now. But there were smaller communities beneath the surface that had better discussion and better communities, and niche interests, and you could lose yourself deep in a better reddit who's front page was nothing like the default. The unfortunate consequence of this granularity and perceived openness was that this meant that early on when people would have otherwise jumped ship to something new they just subscribed to /r/truethatsubredditthatdeclined /r/smalllocalcommunitysubreddit and something super high quality like /r/askhistorians or created their own communities. Of course the website would keep growing itself and be run by the same people who cultivated a bad default page.
Federation is the concession that modern internet users want larger interconnected networks. In the case of lemmy, we want something granular like reddit which allows us to have access to a large network of users while also being able to scale down and become granular and specific. But with federation it's able to be done in a way that is decentralized. In a way that prevents one major player from controlling everything. If reddit decides to make poor decisions or just becomes insufferable we dont have to go to reddit.com/r/better reddit, we can shift over to someones own original creation bleddit. Ideally the decentralized nature should means that the "default sub" wasnt the source of all creativity in the first place.
In practice I dont know if it will ever work. The big sites have so much momentum and critical mass its hard to shed off even a few new users. Look at how big twitter still is while Elon is literally tanking their service and while multiple competitors rise up next to him. One can hope that enough users are shed off the big sites to at least make the smaller pockets of the web viable and lively, but it will be some time yet.
10Honestly, when I left Reddit I was extremely excited by the potential of federation, but at least in the case of Lemmy, my enthusiasm was premature. I mostly stay on Beehaw these days.
I'm a member of a few communities on other instances- for example, I'm super into aquariums and "Pets" just doesn't quite do it for me as it lacks in-depth discussion of aquarium fish, and as an autistic/ADHD adult "neurodivergence" doesn't quite meet my needs as it seems to be strongly focused on people who only have ADHD.
The communities I've joined on other instances don't have a lot of traffic, so I end up back here 99% of the time, and that's okay. If Beehaw decides to become a non-federated community I will still be here. I have a few other accounts I can use to access the Fediverse should I want to do so.
8As a user, I see federation as a system in which one login gives you access to several forums. A bit like Discord, except that Discord is more like chat rooms (the decentralized architecture is not my point).
For me this is a nice but useless feature. I don't mind having several accounts on several servers, I have a password manager.
And, actually, even in the fediverse, I have several accounts to limit the risk of doxing. I can talk about intimate stuff on beehaw (like being bisexual), because I'm someone else on other instance(s) when I talk about the subject of my PhD or my projects on GitHub.
7I'm a software engineer so I understand federation in what it really does.
But the common explanation for users is, it works like email: you can have a Gmail and send an email to someone using Yahoo, and it just works. You don't have to make a Yahoo account to email people still using Yahoo.
That prevents companies from taking the majority of the users and locking it down to outsiders and force people to use a particular instance. People like Elon can't buy Mastodon as a whole, it's simply not possible. And if they buy a big instance like mastodon.social, and start charging $10/mo to use it, people can just move to another instance and it's as if nothing happened.
It guarantees a minimal level of interoperability and resilience, at least for a while. There's no single Lemmy or Mastodon that can be bought or go under and close down. The content is replicated, so even if an instance goes poof, most of the content will remain on other instances. It can't become paywalled, or if it does, people would be actively choosing to post their stuff behind a paywall.
Unlike Twitter and Reddit, Lemmy instances don't have to worry about appeasing to all jurisdictions at once. Americans can use instances that abide by US laws, European instances abide by European laws, Australian instances abide by Australian laws. There might be some defederation going on for legal reasons, but at least you're not being cut off from the whole network, just bits of it. It doesn't have to push you to an entirely different service. You can still talk to worldwide communities that are legal for your instance to federate with. There's no single company there to force you to abide by US/EU/AUS laws even if you and your community members are on the opposite end of the globe. If anything, it prevents a single country from dictating what is allowed on social media.
4I use lemmy like a version of reddit where alt accounts are built in; and where topics as well as users have alt accounts; and where votes are public.
I don't use the rest of the Fediverse yet though I am interested in Funkwhale.
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