Then I think we had a different understanding. My understanding was something akin to what bluesky does with the PDS, the data service just hosts data and hands it over to the other service which is the one actually doing the indexing of that data and aggregating it into communities. The data of the community might be hosted in the hosting services, but it’s accessed, indexed and aggregated through the authentication service.

The access management, the accounts, the distribution of data, etc. that’s still in the server managing the federation. That’s the way I understood it, at least (I’m not the person that originally started this train, that was @[email protected] ).

This allows the content to potentially not be completely lost if an instance dies because it would be easier to carry your data to another instance without losing it. It’s the same principle as in bluesky but applied to the fediverse.

it is more interesting to have users to build a local community than just being a storage server.

Imho, it comes down to how much you care about the content of the community you are building. The reason I’m in lemmy.ml and not some smaller instance is because of problems like the ones showcased here.

If I could self-host my own content I would not mind being somewhere else. In fact, I’m considering setting up something through brid.gy. The fact that there isn’t a separation of the hosting means that if I want to secure my content I need to have my own 1-person instance which is not something the protocol is very well suited for. Plus it’s likely most lemmy instances would not federate with it anyway since, understandably, they may prefer an allowlist approach rather than blocklist. The only sane way would be to have the instances have full control of the access as they are now, with storage being in a separate service that can be managed separately, the hosting service.

it is currently recommended to mod from local accounts

Would this change at all if there was a hosting service?

I expect you would still be recommended to mod from local accounts (the “authenticator”), even if the content hosting was a separate service. The local account would continue being the primary source of access to the content… note that having a separate hosting service doesn’t mean that the hosting service must be the one managing access to the content from the fediverse.

Hosting involves removal of content

Exactly. That means instances would not longer have that responsibility. That would be on the hosting service, meaning less pressure for the instance. Once they ban the user, the content would not be shown, it would be purged from the federating network of that instance, regardless of whether the hosting service actually deletes it or not (but I expect it would be better if the protocol makes it so banning a user sends a notification to the hosting service).

At the moment, if a Lemmy.world user spams CSAM content everywhere, other admins can reach out to the LW admins, they ban the users and purge the content.

It’s more complex than that, at the moment, because the purge also involves mirrored content in other federating instances. The interesting part is that after it’s triggered, then the process is pretty much automatic. When purging, Lemmy.world admins don’t have to manually go around asking to all the other instances to delete the content. The purge request is currently being notified automatically to instances federating with it. Why would it be any different for a content hosting service?

Since he said that the authenticator is the one that handles the communication & access, I expect banning the person from the authenticator would already automatically prevent anyone using that authenticator (or any other authenticator federating with it) from seeing the content.

As I understand it, the only thing the content provider would do is hosting the data. But access to that data would be determined by the service doing the access control, in the same way current instances are doing it.

It’s reductive if you see “stereotypes” as something simple. Imho, stereotypes are very complex (or perhaps another word would be “archetypes”, if the word “stereotypes” has too many secondary connotations for native speakers, maybe).

To me the “stereotype” (or “archetype”, or “social construct” like I pointed in my first comment) of a “woman” includes every characteristic or aspect that could make someone identify a person as a “woman”. Not all aspects might manifest in all women, the more aspects match, the more confidence the person would have to identify the other as a woman. Same for “man”, in fact, it could be a person matches both stereotypes/archetypes at an equal amount. Also there can be other gender stereotypes outside those two, because as long as you are using a word to describe a category of people you’d often have a complex set of properties that people would use to define whether it fits that category or not.

I agree that putting people in a box is just contributing to segregation, but I did not choose that, I’m just trying to understand how people are using the words other people invented. It’s almost inevitable, even the word “trans” is in some way a category, and there are even super and sub categories… like say “LGBTQ+” or “non-binary”.

What I said is that for a trans, “gender relates to what stereotype (social construct) a person identifies with”. I did not say their gender matches a particular stereotype, but that it relates to it.

Someone who does not identify with a typical stereotype and believes that this makes them be of a different gender, is defining their gender based on whether they fit (or don’t fit, in this case) a specific social stereotype.

However, someone who does not believe gender relates to stereotypes at all would not see that person as having a different gender because that person’s gender (for those people) would be unrelated to whether they match (or identify themselves with) a stereotype or not.

Of course you (or anyone) don 't need to have surgery to conform to other people’s gender stereotypes. But I don’t think that’s what was implied here.

What’s “feminine”? is that not a gender stereotype? I don’t think there’s anything wrong about being a man that closer fits a feminine stereotype than a masculine one.

what they really mean is that “men are supposed to be one way and women are supposed to be another,” with the implication that someone isn’t a real man or women if they are not that stereotype

I think what they often imply is that for them gender is just a way to refer to male and female sex, and not really a stereotype. If someone is female/male then in their eyes they are a woman/man regardless of what they look or how they behave, because it’s not about social stereotypes for them. Even if a man looks and behaves like a stereotypical woman, it would not stop being “a real man” because for them gender isn’t about looks, behavior or feelings of identity.

However, the trans community sees gender as something that relates to what stereotype (social construct) a person identifies with, and this makes gender independent of sex, because you can identify with a gender stereotype that does not match the stereotype that you might typically associate with your biological sex.

Is that really what people mean by it being easier?

In Bluesky you are asked to choose a “Hosting provider” when you sign up… it;'s just that it’s set by default to Bluesky and actually trying to set something else makes the experience of signing in much harder… so actually I feel Bluesky is the one for which the process is harder, if anything.

I can’t even get a direct url to the sign up page of https://bsky.app/ …but I can link https://lemmy.ml/signup

Nobody is being forced to seek an alternative instance to whichever they found first. In the same way that nobody in Bluesky has to use Bluesky as their hosting provider or even choose to self host their PDS.

Nice! It also seems to be under discussion on lemmy’s github here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818

It does not have to be something mandatory…

I mean, there could be some form of “metacommunities”, something like being able to group multiple communities together in a “view” that shows them to you visually as if they were a single community despite being separated. Bonus points if everyone can make their own custom groupings (but others can subscribe to them… so there can be some community-managed groupings).

In theory you could have multiple “metacommunities” for the same topic still… but at least they could be sharing the same posts if they share communities. I feel grouping like this would be helpful because small communities feel even smaller when they are split.

I think reddit has something similar to that, multireddits or something I think they are called.

That’s the problem: the protocol pretty much requires explicit relationships between instances since they are forced to proxy/cache each other’s content. I think there’s too much responsibility on the instance… I feel it would be a moderation nightmare to host an instance with truly open federation (potentially even result in legal trouble!). So I totally understand why so many instances want to be conservative on who they federate with…

The ideal situation would be to be to be able to interact with third party instances directly (at least when the 2 instances don’t wanna agree on caching each other’s content), instead of having to use your home instance as proxy/cache… so the home instance would not need to have the burden (both legally and in terms of hosting resources) and it would just act as a way to identify the user, not necessarily as the primary content provider.

Potentially, using some sort of predictable hashing to get the same id across instances might also help in the detection of duplicate links so that they can be aggregated in a single place (sort of what was suggested at point 2 here).

I fear this could be too much of a breaking change though.

3. A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

This would be great… also I feel offering this might even be a requirement for a server to be fully GDPR compliant (though I could be wrong on that, IANAL).

I’d argue it’s search engines and social networks the ones that grant any level of "virality and discoverability ", not the internet itself. In the internet you need “third party” solutions for indexing or searching.

I mean, Mastodon probably intentionally lacks tools that enhance “virality and discoverability”, but that’s not the same thing as saying that it actively prevents information spread. You could in theory build a search engine for toots, or an alternate fork that does have those features. It’s even free and open source software, so it’s open to whatever.

Can Mastodon actually subscribe to a static ActivityPub feed?

A lot of blogs are statically generated (it’s cheaper, faster and safer). Ideally, static websites could just generate JSON-LD for ActivityPub in a similar way as how they generate XML for RSS, which would make the transition easier… but last time I checked Mastodon didn’t support that very well, so RSS was still a better fit in many situations since it does not require an active server component. I’d love to be shown otherwise.