I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn’t come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they’re either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I’m on Bluesky too, but once that goes I’ll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
I think this video explains it better than I could do https://videos.elenarossini.com/w/64VuNCccZNrP4u9MfgbhkN
You data isn’t hoarded up and sold by the likes of meta etc.
Is that true though, with threads using activity pub?
Yeah it’s absolutely not true, everything done on the fediverse/activitypub is extremely easy to scrape (an unavoidable consequence of the design) and inevitably will be, if it isn’t happening already. Though, it’s true that it’s not being hoarded and since everyone can scrape it, it’s probably not being sold either!
Of course it is public. But I can be pseudo anonymous. I can have multiple aliases on different instances and I don’t have to register my phone number or other personal information. There’s no trackers tracking every damn thing I look at and correlating it all together. I can use it over Tor or VPN if I need more anonymization…
Sorry, maybe I’m misunderstanding. It’s just that none of what you’ve listed is inherent to the fediverse? There’s nothing preventing data collection of that sort by an instance owner, and claiming anonymity on a system explicitly designed around open ledger social media doesn’t seem entirely credible. There’s nothing preventing someone from including tracking pixels, for example, and your browser can still be fingerprinted and linked to your activity on lemmy by 3rd parties through a number of meta-analytical approaches.
I love the fediverse and there’s lots of good reasons for that, but I really just don’t think anonymity is a selling point here. Again, might be misunderstanding what you mean, if so I apologize!
New platforms can set up shop and already have an existing userbase/contentbase to show. The main issue with setting up, let’s say, an Instagram competitor, is that nobody uses it, so nobody will use it as it lacks content. ActivityPub removes this problem. If someone wanted to set up their own competitor to Mastodon, they can. People can use it and tap into the existing userbase.
Good point: Look at lemmy - kbin - piefed. The guy behind kbin thought “lemmy is nice but I could make something better”, and then whoever is behind mbin saw that and said “I can make kbin better” and forked it. But without starting over in terms of connectivity or content! And now we have piefed which is on the edge of being even better and it’s still introperable. The power of that can’t be undersold.
I think that’s basically the whole point. Or if someone would rather use Mastodon - look, the lemmy userbase is there as well!
Piefed, Mbin and Lemmy aren’t necessarily aggressively competing like X and Bluesky are. It’s moreso friendly cooperation. Sure, if the fediverse was a bit more commercialised, you’d have competition. But it would be fairer competition based on how good your Software and ethics are and not on who else is also using the app.
The Fediverse is controlled by the people. Mainstream social media is controlled by wannabe kings.
You can play with moderation tiers. We have societies with Reddit-tier fascist moderators and other societies where the moderation just bans spammers and flooders. That’s nice. Of course we’re shifting to moderation craziness too, but very slowly and it is impossible to completely kill the freedom because of the federation background.
Social media is a garden that needs to be tended
No fucking algorithm, honestly. I don’t need some rich white pricks trying to constantly show me what they want me to see.
Lemmy has an algorithm though (active, hot, and scaled sorting)
I think you mean that you can choose a project that doesn’t have an “algorithm” (in the sense that you’re conveying).
Anyone can create a project with ActivityPub that has an algorithm for feeding content to you.
Mostly just the resilience and control. An outage or censorship incident on one node can be contained, isolated, and users can easily go around it.
“Oh no, my preferred instance went down!” switches to another instance with the exact same contentAlso, I think some European governments run Mastodon servers for themselves. Which sounds weird, but makes more sense in an IT security context. Their data, stored on their servers, that they manage. No third party business contractors needed.
control is dispersed and you can flee bs to a better instance. This makes it almost impossible to censor in a targeted way.
The only advantage I can see is that is goes back to a more fragmented internet.
The internet of hundreds of forums forming small communities, but this time you don’t need to make an account on every single forum.
All the problems I see people complaining about in my opinion they all have in common one thing, too many people in a single place. Either because it gets impossible to manage and moderate or it needs to make money because it is very expensive to run.
It’s the best.
Social media owned by some billionaire asshole is for idiots.
No billionaire owns any angle of human behavior.
Except maybe blood lust.
They own my blood lust.
I’m thirsty.
must be the pretzels.
There is no single point of failure.
If one instance goes down they don’t take the whole thing with it. If one instance gets taken over by corporate interests, it does not take all the other instances with it.
If a community on sweatyballs.social is dogshit, someone can create the same named community on poopfed.io as a replacement. The site administrator of sweatyballs.social can’t do anything about that.
This can also be a negative to some degree, but being able to block and defederate allow for mitigating those risks.
Think of federation as potential redundancy for data and discussion. Individually an instance of whatever platform you’re using can be great, bad, or start off nice and get worse, but as long as there is federation of the good parts of communication among the people, there’s going to be somewhere else you can go if your first source goes downhill. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than a single location where users are at the mercy of whoever runs and controls it.
The special thing about federated social media is that if you don’t like something about one specific instance you can go to another instance or even create your own and still be part of the whole system. You’re not stuck with some leadership that you have to endure. Instead you can be your own boss or choose a nice place to stay.
I think all the other things that people like about it, like “no algorithm”, come naturally from this fact but are not inherent to the system.
It takes power away from the hands of corporations.
Sorry you got suckered into choosing bluesky over Mastodon. Hopefully you’ll learn one day.
Content is not being actively pushed upon you, rather it’s you that decide what you see like Facebook was at the beginning.
It allows you to use the platform to keep up with other people’s lives instead of watching ads, news article someone liked and you’re not interested in and ragebait.
