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Can you explain the fediverse and your experiences with it?
user3028938
Member
in General
I get the general idea but is it really a useful thing, to have federation between platforms?
I have read the hype about its benefits, that decentralized and different platforms can communicate with each other but I am interested in real world experiences of people of whether it is actually useful or just a lot of hot air.
Comments
It all depends between what you do and how you do. Where it is and what it is.
Honestly? Sounded good on paper but sort of a train wreck in reality. There is also this unexplainable phenomenon where a larger than usual representation of insufferable social justice warriors and far left anarchists are on every Fediverse public service. The type of people who think reddit isn't censored enough seemingly congregate on many of these platforms.
Agreed. IMO if there were more diversity of opinion on the reducers, it’d make it more bearable. The idea itself isn’t bad, but it does contribute to me thinking that the issue might just lie in social media-style platforms themselves. The fediverse just feels like a stepping stone to the real best outcome, and that is spending less time online overall.
Thanks, that is much clearer to me now.
I did notice that.
It is quite explicable I think.
Many flocked over in exodus (Xodus?) from X/twitter once elon released the hounds (alt-righters).
It was actually further left before the Xodus because it was so much more niche. There were a lot of moderate people in the first waves after the Twitter acquisition, but they didn't stick around.
I am very socially progressive myself (though I personally disregard ideas of left/right), and I agree with you. I tried to use Bluesky for a bit. It got to a point where I realized I could not filter for content that I actually wanted to keep up-to-date with unless I only had it show people I followed — and that point I'd rather just use an RSS feed.
Matrix is cool, though. I like Matrix.
they are another alias of wutang clan
No
Depends. If there's a community that's spread across multiple instances, federation is going to help immensely. Federation is more about being able to communicate to people on different people on different servers/services, akin to Matrix, email, etc, but not stopping at mere microblogging.
The Fediverse is a loose collective of servers running the same software that might or might not integrate with one another. The idea is that users sign-up for a server with like minded people, (essentially a community), and they can then interact with users signed up to their server, and also users on other servers/communities, (assuming the two are connected/federated).
What this means is that communities develop and then connect to each other, (or not), as they see fit. Depending on which server you end up on you will have very different experiences, so the idea is you join a server of like-minded people and then trust the admin to connect you to other communities, whilst keeping you "safe" from other "harmful" communities.
Some servers cater to Gay/Trans people, others cater to Alt-Right types and yet others focus on specific community interests, (photography, cyber security, cooking etc etc). The concept of Federation allows theses different communities to connect or block each other as their admins think is appropriate.
People who say that the Fediverse is too left-wing, woke, fascist or whatever else don't understand how it works because there's communities for everyone...but what you see and your impression of the Fediverse is determined by the server you've joined and the communities that do/don't federate with it.
Being decentralised, the Fediverse doesn't have Moderators, (as such). Each server admin is responsible for the moderation of their community. Plenty of servers have little or no moderation at all, but generally they got blocked by most other servers to prevent harassment.
Generally the "free speech" servers will feel emptier and more like an echo chamber, but that's because you have the freedom to say what you want and other people have the freedom to listen to you or not. On the centralised platforms you say things and people are forced to see it whether they want to or not, whereas on decentralised platforms people have more freedom to choose what they see.
In terms of personal experience, running your own server isn't cheap, (for example a Mastodon server needs a half-decent dedi), and the server admin has total control, (can read your DMs, delete your posts etc), so signing up to random servers probably isn't a great idea, but if you're already part of a community then setting up your own server might be an improvement on using centralised platforms that harvest your data and force feed you rage bait.
I agree with you almost entirely, but this last point isn't necessarily true - running a small instance for just you or a few friends will sit very happily on a cheap VPS, and then you're your own moderator - you can federate with every alt-right instance you like, and block all the lefty furries, if that floats your boat.
I tend to view it as the 21st century version of a pre-Eternal September Usenet; slightly siloed geeks talking with their own communities and local, potentially despotic moderation. Works for some folk, doesn't for others.
Yeah, I ran a Mastodon instance with 2k users on a $7.60/m Hetzner CAX21 and the cheapest mounted storage box for media
Looks like I need to revisit the Mastodon requirements because the server I'm on, (infosec.exchange), is spread across 3 Hetzner dedis with scaling so I just assumed it'd be out of reach
Or you can host altenative implementation plemora or GoToSocial whicj fine host on 1GB RAM VPS for me.
I mean, infosec has 12k active users; it's a pretty big instance so yeah, it probably takes some significant hardware to run it.
Yeah, infosec is huge and some features like elastisearch increase the requirements dramatically.>
@ailice said:
Yeah. Those are super efficient. Akkoma is a fork of Pleroma which I hear is better supported. I use Mastodon for the UI. I used Pleroma and Akkoma for a bit as single user instances.
https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
Single user can also look at Mitra and Akkoma
Nice synopsis, thanks.
Hmm but I think still the userbase of the fediverse will have a very small proportion of alt-righters, compared to say truth social or 4chan.
Likewise with reddit, there are very right wing subs on there but they usually get nuked pretty fast but keep popping up again and again but the fact is as a site it is extremely left biased. I get that the fediverse is not the same because it is decentralized so won't have the same top down moderation, but still righties will be put off by all the wokeness.
Seems the user @tsusu above had the opposite. I do not have an opinion as not tried it properly yet.
Why would signing up to random servers matter? Not like you are sharing secrets. If you join one you don't like you just leave without conversing with people much so don't see the problem of 'they can see everything'. Well if I wanted to have private chats sure but I would pick another platform for not. My interest in this fediverse stuff is community and so not a big deal they are not totally private. I know from running a rocketchat server that you would be able to read people private messages but I never saw a cause to so it is not something I am not aware of and don't see it as an issue in this circumstance.
You should be hopefully joining servers with likeminded people who will have similar views so would have little fear of hiding your own views.
I get the general idea that if you say had a server for chat on matrix you can then find another platform for blogging to share different content with the same userbase right? and so they are different platforms with their own features for different kinds of interaction but share the same language to talk to each other is that right?
Please give background for us none too crusty neckbeards.
Well I was around during 28/56k but never got onto the whole irc and bulletin boards stuff.
I barely used the internet until the first broadband a few years later as it was just painfully slow until then and that is when I dove in with mmorpgs for a couple of years like FINALLY I can use it for some real fun!
Oh yea and things like twitter and tiktok are just exhausting. I try to put in hashtags related to people I might like to see stuff from but they are just like total unadulterated trash to navigate those platforms. Reems and reems of garbage and that is even for the ones I was looking for!
I mean their posts might be of value but the sites seem to be designed to bewilder you and get you stuck in endless scrolling, which of course we know is exactly the case.
That is what has motivated me more to make something myself again.
I've been using it since twitter got bought up by a(nother) rich bigot. I've been running my own mastodon instance for three people on an lxc with 2gb of ram and 2 cores. Storage is s3 compatible storage at tebi.io.
Personally I find it a lot more bearable than most social media, especially since you can follow hashtags, really have full control of your feed and who can or cannot follow you.
Is it an echo chamber? Sure, but only as much as you make it. You really have control over the content you see.
You mean Jack Dorsey? I didn't know about his past, only about when he sold it. I just presumed he was there from the start and did not care to investigate his history.
If it is just for 3 people is there really any point going to all that trouble rather than just communicating by email or something?
We used to have a tiny music group, probably 3-5 regulars with a couple more coming in and out from time to time, which met each week to play music and just email chains to keep in touch worked fine there.
One man's echo chamber is another person's focused content.
Who cares if someone else wants to call it an echo chamber? It is about serving the purpose you want well.
What I hate about the other platforms is that you get random trolls popping up on opposing fronts to just troll to get kicks. One of the worst examples is I saw is where a lady had terminal cancer and some cretins saying they can't wait for them to die. Extreme example but proves the point there is nothing really positive in having people being negative like that in your feed.
Now at the same time I am against the extreme moderation approach of reddit where any slight dissenting opinion gets called 'hate speech' and they must keep their undisturbed 'safe space' (yuck) at all times.
The important thing is that with these decentralized ones you are the one that gets to choose the rules not some top down authority which overrules your own opinions on how it should be run, like reddit and such, which you have to accept if you use their platform.
It's federated; you can communicate with the entire fediverse(*), not just folk on your instance. This is something that the fediverse is spectacularly bad at explaining to non-users.
The (tired and inaccurate, but not entirely wrong) analogy is email - just because your email is on hotmail doesn't mean you can't send email to anyone on a different domain.
(*) subject to blocklists and suchlike