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?
Preventing one single entity from having too much control over information to the extent that they can push propaganda and dominate a narrative.
Decentralization leads to better (I didn’t say perfect) democratization of social media.
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.
More choice, individual and grouped control, while still being - by default - connected between instances and platforms which would otherwise be splitting if people and critical mass.
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.
The biggest thing is control and censorship.
On the corporate side if your posts and content are seen as too extreme in one way or another, depending on what government or group … you can be censored and have you posted either deleted, dismissed or hidden. In extreme cases, your account can also be shut down.
Xitter is already a propaganda hell hole that only pushes right wing content because they pushed out any criticism.
FB actively pushes its own content based on the highest bidder which often just means pushing right wing and conservative content in a regular basis.
Bluesky as open as it’s supposed to be has already had problems in Turkey where the government there asked bluesky to restrict access to many accounts.
The Fediverse will have these same problems and people and governments will try to censor people but due to the open non centralized nature of the system, it will be much harder for any one group or government to censor anyone. The only way they could shut it down would be to completely outlaw any platform that uses the protocol everywhere.
Pro:
- Interplatform Interaction(Activity Pub): Instances if the same platform and the Instances themselves can communicate (message, post, upvote, etc) with each other if they are federated.
- Decentralized: Community managed instances means no commertial interest, no single point of failure and the option of having your own rules. Intances with bad rules or intentions do not get federated (can’t interact with each other).
- Free Open Source Software: Transparency and comumity contributions, If a project is abandoned it can always come back in the form a fork…
- Privacy: No data collection, no data selling
- No advertisements
- No shitty UI
Con:
- Decentralized: People do not expect to have to choose a instance(server), and assume they are missing out on the other servers joining a particular one. And since its community supported the uptime and longevity of instances may be cut short.
- Free Open Source Software: Community volunteers to delevop the platforms on their free time means that sometimes development can be slow or even the project is abandoned.
- Cost on missing out on already established Big Tech platforms
I agree with your comment except that I think you’ve got the privacy part wrong there. Any company can come in and scrape all the information they want, including upvote and downvote info.
In addition, if you try to delete a comment, it’s very likely that it won’t be deleted by every instance who federates with yours.
Yes, correct. I’ve should have mentioned that no tracking from the platform/instances themselves. Thank you by the way.
What stops your instance from fingerprinting its users and selling that data? Even without explicit calls to google analytics or similar tools, you can do a lot with http requests and regular browser headers. I’m not saying that lemmy.zip does this, but lemmy isn’t free of tracking by design, is it?
IMO it’s ban/block evasion which is the biggest con to decentralization. It’s a problem on centralized platforms but the many servers design makes it easier on fediverse.
It’s not a huge deal to me because I don’t block many things but might be a consideration for people with a sensitive disposition.
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.
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.
control is dispersed and you can flee bs to a better instance. This makes it almost impossible to censor in a targeted way.
It takes power away from the hands of corporations.
Sorry you got suckered into choosing bluesky over Mastodon. Hopefully you’ll learn one day.
Resilience. Federated social media is resilient against censoring and corporate takeover.
It.does however not help with eee attacks which I why most of us block threads and a lot will block other fediverse sized (or larger) single instances of eg bluesky etc.
Other, less important (to me) benefits are no algorithms, no profit motive, no ads.
The fediverse is just better in any way.
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.
Its more obvious on Mastodon since Mastodon federates with everybody. Imagine, while being on Twitter and without leaving the Twitter app, being able to post and comment on Reddit, watch YouTube videos and leave comments, and also interact with people on Instagram and Facebook. Some blogs also federate too via WordPress. I know you dont have to imagine that since you’re here, but when I first started out it blew my mind.
Now, the way I phrase it to people I’m pitching the platforms to is “You get to choose whether you want to be in the hands of either a Corp that wants to turn you into profits for their shareholders, or you can put your data in the hands of some autistic dork who is really, really passionate about either server architecture or infosec. There’s pros and cons there. Bluesky and Twitter fundamentally are not on your side, they want money from somewhere, but they can afford to pay people to both keep their servers running efficiently and defend against bad actors. The admins of Lemmy and Mastodon are fundamentally on our side, but the quality you’re going to see is on par with a hobby project.”
In your example, if bluesky goes you lose it all (until/if their form of federation actually exists and is usable). If the Mastodon server I’m on (toot.community, because I like the name) goes, you move to another or host your own and keep on trucking.
When reddit did their API shit i left and lost the account, subreddits, apps, everything. When Lemm.ee announced it’s shutdown i moved to lemmy.zip and picked up exactly where I left off.
