I call it commitment and willinness to place your nuts on the line.

What skin in the game is required from someone to create an account on lemmy.world or mastodon.social? Conversely, what type of “bad consequences” is there for some admin that sets up an instance and fails to manage it properly? There isn’t any.

Instances provide governance in a natural, organic way

There is nothing organic about instances because there is no natural limit to how big they can get. The cost per user on an instance grows sub-linearly with the amount of users in an instance. This is why we are ending up with this power-law distribution and the majority of users go to the “flagship” instances and the minority spread around on micro-instances.

You are joining a social group. This is the natural order of things.

Social connections and the relationships are only meaningful if they have some shared context. Your family/extended family, the people you’ve went to school with, your swimming team mates, your co-workers, your neighbors, etc. But once we go past a certain scale (Dunbar’s Number) people start seeing individuals and just treat everyone else as interchangeable masses of crowds.

Don’t like it, or want to tinker? Spin up your own.

The absolute majority of people are only looking at social media platforms as a means to something. They don’t care whether they found the information they were looking for on Reddit, or lemmy.world or piefed.social. They don’t care if they are avoiding boredom at the subway by scrolling videos on Instagram, TikTok or loops. If we keep demanding people to understand the power dynamics each instance just before joining or tell them, they will just turn their heels over to the status quo.

Do we expect every single user to assess all of the toxic communities

No, I want users to have access to a list of pre-curated communities and let them customize it to their liking, like what Fediverser does.

In the same way that defederation is an admin-level decision impacting all of the userbase

Defederation is a bad way to manage conflict. It is a nuclear option that should be taken only when the offending instance (as a whole) is malicious. To stretch this “my server, my rules” philosophy further is bad design.

Good admins are like good janitors. They are not there to enforce behavior top-down.

I forgot that you are selective with your tolerance with hyperbole.

I mean features about customizing behavior (“Trump Musk filter”, “Vote weighting”) and the things where the data is publicly available but hidden only for admins, like “Attitude and Reputation scoring”.

It seems like every single one of those features are just settings that could (and should) be implemented client-side, and left up to the user who wants to have control over their experience.

Vocata is great as a concept, but not practical at all. Even the developer of the project agrees. If you know your way around Python and/or Javascript, you might be interested be interested in my ActivityPub Toolkit project, though.

As instances are currently structured, they are tied to web domain, and actually owned by somebody somewhere. That somebody has a level of commitment having setup hosting and configured the server itself, and likely to want to not lose their toys

In this system, the people that simply want to access the web MUST trust the server owner and the people that want to have full control over their identity MUST setup their own server.

This is complex, fragile, expensive and a huge barrier of entry. Just this week the admins of the second largest lemmy instance are closing down their server and 5000 people are left with no choice but to move on from their identity and find a new home.

Email doesn’t have that. The WWW doesn’t have that. Phone networks doesn’t have that. Bluesky doesn’t have that.

The communities were created, it doesn’t mean that they have people using them. I’m just hoping now that the people will be forced to move out of lemm.ee that maybe this change can be done to these topic-specific instances.

I will repeat my comment from yesterday.

the following communities have already an alternative on instances that I run

• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]

All these instances have been running for close to two years and are part of the “topic-specific” network of servers that I set up to help during the migration.

But if you mean only the implementation, you could very well be correct, knowing so much more than I about such.

Yeah, that’s what I mean. I’ve written a series of blog posts about it.

Should I add an entry for metacritics or should you?

The following communities have already an alternative on instances that I run:

• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]
• [email protected] -> [email protected]

All these instances have been running for close to two years and are part of the “topic-specific” network of servers that I set up to help during the migration.

To be completely honest, my dislike of AP server software is not restricted to PieFed. I think all of them are an evolutionary dead end and I wish we stopped wasting our time trying to emulate closed social networks.

So what’s the point of voting since we don’t know its reasons ?

Don’t overcomplicate this. Voting is a way to collectively curate content. If it is relevant to the community and you feel the content is a positive addition to the community, you vote up. If you think it’s a negative addition, you vote it down. That’s all that there is to it.

that people prefer to post on other instances than yours.

This again?

Even if I had never created any of the topic-specific instances and I all I had was Communick as an user instance. How many instances have we both seem go down? How many admins have you seen showing up full of enthusiasm to burn out some months/years later? Why is it that my manage to keep my (few) users satisfied with the service? Why is it that I don’t feel overworked?

I’m not talking with other “people”. I’m talking with you. You raised every possible objection against what I am doing. Yet, it keeps growing. Slower than I’d hoped, but growing. It has been self-sustaining. But you continue to look for ways to discredit me.

There have been discussions about how to implement this before. But it has to be done in a way that is agreed by other threadiverse software.

I think we should move away from “threadiverse software” and embrace a transparent social web.

If we want to be transparent, we need to stop creating these leaky abstractions. Votes are not private. A vote on Lemmy is just a Like, a downvote is just a dislike. Instead of pretending this information should be private, we should make it clear to the users that they should only react in anyway if they feel comfortable in sharing their opinion in public.

• It qualifies as activity. People are posting when it matters to them.

• It still is unrelated to the point. The point is that you keep betting on donation-based instances because you want them to succeed, yet history is (repeatedly) showing it to you that these bets are not good.

• The flair part does not federate.
• They send fake (non-existing) actor ids for votes to obfuscate the identity of the real user. It is “compliant”, but completely against the spirit of a public social network.
• Every proposal that I’ve seen from them had ActivityPub as an afterthought. Creating “Feed” as a type of Actor, using a special formatted type of message to share ip addresses of abusers for “spam mitigation” even before considering a simple usage of the Flag activity, etc.

I am not saying they have bad intentions. I am just saying that they prefer to develop things that work for them first and for the rest of the Fediverse second.

And healthy.community and viewfinder.pro are getting activity from other people who are just focused on doing their thing. What does this have to do with the overall point?

How the future of feddit will be?

I don’t know what it will be, but I hope that it becomes less about “instances” and servers and it becomes more a proper web of independent applications that share the social graph.

Piefed also has this Mastodon-esque tendency to implement features that only work on their system and are not interoperable with the rest of the ActivityPub software. Which is the kind of thing that is only “nice” until they are a minority player, but could make them one of the most hated systems if they start getting significant users.