Max-P

Guarantee there will be questions of cost of setup, maintenance, and risks.

And time moderating it, especially if they run their own. At least with Twitter/Facebook/YouTube, you get a lot of moderation for free whether you agree with it or not.

And if they use another instance, there’s other liability questions about the particular instance to choose. If they’re gonna represent an official city account, you’d expect some cybersecurity certifications to be a requirement and all kinds of stuff, even if it’s a free service. The instance admins interfering, possibly steering opinions during city elections, etc.

Nobody cares about decentralized social networks, the technology, or how terrible the other outlets are. For a municipality, you may want to focus on maintaining multiple channels of communications and ways to reach and engage the most users. You could then fold the fediverse into it as one more channel. Something they should keep an eye on. They’ll need a way to post the same content to all those channels with the least effort. Something easy that a trained intern or clerk can do.

In this case IMO it might even be better to use something like Wordpress with the ActivityPub plugin, or alternatives to that. I imagine a city mostly posts announcements and stuff, so a blog that serves as both an official website and you can follow and interact with it from the comfort of your preferred social service sounds a lot more appealing than just another social media without that many users. Can even use more plugins to post to Facebook and Twitter as well, all from one place. Given the age of the board, they’re also more likely to know and care about Threads and Bluesky compatibility just because they have more users, and bureaucratic decisions are based on numbers. A nice graph showing if they join the fediverse they capture all the users fleeing Twitter by supporting AP and AT.

You can block them and over time it should get better, or you can write a script that does some checks and blocks them for you.

A few woes at the beginning but it’s been running smoothly since. If you have experince setting up stuff in Docker and exposing them to the Internet over HTTPS, it pretty much mostly just works.

That’s pretty much why I made my own instance: nobody can take it away from me. I can ban whichever instance I deem hostile or don’t want content from. Nobody’s taking away my API anymore or shoving ads in my face.

Nobody can pull a Reddit or Twitter on the fediverse, there will always be alternative instances to use putting pressure on the big ones to not drive away people.

You can’t, because normies don’t care about tech other than it benefits them directly in some way. They care about the experience they get and doing the same thing everyone does because normies are like sheeps.

Normies barely even get how emails work and it’s been like over 40 years. They know if they sign up for Gmail it’s free, they get a ton of space and an @gmail.com address. That’s it.

And even then, people looked at me weird back in 2007 when I made my Gmail account because “everyone uses Hotmail, why wouldn’t you use Hotmail, everyone uses it so it must be the best”. Heck just yesterday, the teller at the mechanic shop looked at me weird because I used [email protected] to place the online order, they were utterly confused. They thought I made a Gmail or Outlook for all of those aliases. People don’t think about using emails, they think about using Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.

Same with Reddit, it didn’t become popular until normies felt like they were missing out by not being on Reddit, and arguably that was Reddit’s downfall flooding the site with the same repeated arguments and opinions over and over. And for that too, I’ve been told my “Reddit looks weird” because I use a third-party app. People want to use Reddit so they download Reddit.

Normies don’t use Twitter because they want to microblog, they use Twitter because their idols are on Twitter and they want to mimic them. If Taylor Swift opened a Mastodon account and posted exclusively there, we’d get a massive spike of users. And they all would want to register on the same instance as her and it would be the only viable instance to them.

They just want to fit in and do the same as the others, using the same services and same apps and everything. “Influencers” are everything these days.

The best way to get normies on the Fediverse is IMO, endorsing Threads and BlueSky, which will effectively force them to integrate because those platforms integrate.

Only time will tell. They’ve definitely done their own share of EEE like for a while you could use Facebook Messenger over XMPP then closed it down.

Definitely can appreciate the carefulness here. Imagine they just open the floodgates and now some random Mastodon instance on a $5 VPS is getting hammered with millions of activities because they followed an account with millions of followers on Threads, and now it’s federating millions of likes and thousands of posts.

Meta is trying to be a good fediverse participant here. They could just come in and crush the entire fediverse and be like “lol should have gotten beefier servers”.

From a user’s perspective, yes, but as an instance admin that’s also a DMCA nightmare.

That’s a great example of the eternal fight between mods and users that ultimately drives admins away: users feel entitled to post that stuff, and mods have to take it down. The user is anonymous and possibly from a country with very lax laws, so they’re protected. The admins have to pay for the servers with real money and their real identity, and thus also an easy target for lawyers.

Porn is often really high traffic, which is expensive to run. But a lot of people are weirdos too and tend to push it to the border of legality, which can be challenging for admins if your users keep posting lolis even if it’s not allowed. And they’ll scream at you “it’s not technically illegal”.

The other thing people do a lot with porn is post stuff from sketchy sources or repost paid content for free stealing from OnlyFans pages and the big porn studios. And lately, AI generated porn of non-consenting celebrities. And of course now the increasing pressure to make sure to keep minors out or heaven forbid they’re shown trans porn.

It’s expensive to store all that porn, it’s insanely expensive to distribute it, you need lawyers on standby for the firehose of DMCA reports, you need a solid team of moderators scrubbing the site as fast as possible for CSAM, or run AI tools that needs a lot of fast hardware to run at any decent speed (you need to analyze every frame of a video, for example).

It’s just expensive as fuck overall and that’s why a lot of the porn sites have the sketchiest ads ever, and that’s because you can’t run regular ads as most advertisers don’t want to be shown next to questionable content.

On the fediverse you have the added challenge that ideally, you scrub things before they get federated due to federation bugs. Or you risk being defederated which you probably will anyway as most admins just don’t want to deal with it.

Profiles, yes that’d be nice as that’d bridge the gap with Mastodon and enable users to do standalone posts but see it threaded instead of the horrible microblogging UX for that.

Chat, I don’t think belong to ActivityPub, it works alright for direct messages but that’s it. It wouldn’t scale well for this amount of traffic for a chat. But you can however put your Discord/Matrix/IRC on your profile, and communities can put their own Discord/Matrix/IRC rooms link in the description to form a chat community around the Lemmy community. Maybe an option would be adding dedicated fields for those so that it can be added to the UI to direct you to those transparently. UIs could implement some support for those and embed the chat rooms in the page.

Firstly, remember than each piefed account only has one alt account and it’s always the same alt account doing the votes with the same gibberish user name. It’s an open source project so the mechanics of it cannot be kept secret and they can be verified by anyone with intermediate Python knowledge.

That implies trust in the person that operates the instance. It’s not a problem for piefed.social, because we can trust you. It will work for your instance. But can you trust other people’s PieFed instances? It’s open-source, I could just install it on my server, change the code to make me 2-3 alt accounts instead. Pick a random instance from lemmy.world’s instance list, would you blindly trust them to not fudge votes?

The availability of the source code doesn’t help much because you can’t prove that it’s the exact code that’s running with no modifications, and marking people running modified code as suspicious out of the box would be unfair and against open-source culture.

I also see some deanonymization exploits too: people commonly vote+comment, so with some time, you can do correlation attacks and narrow down the accounts. So to prevent that, you’d have to remove the users mapping 1:1 to a gibberish alt by at least letting the user rotate them on demand, or rotate them on a schedule, and now we can’t correlate votes to patterns anymore. And everyone’s database endlessly fills up with generated alt accounts (that you can’t delete).

If the person is always downvoting or always voting the same as another person you’ll see those patterns in their alt and the alt can be banned.

Sure, but you lose some visibility into who the user is. Seeing the comments is useful to get a better grasp of who they are. Maybe they’re just a serial fact checker and downvoting misinformation and posting links to reputable sources. It can also help identify if there’s other activity beside just votes, large amounts of votes are less suspicious if you see the person’s also been engaging with comments all day.

And then you circle back to, do you trust the instance admin to investigate or even respond to your messages? How is it gonna go when a big, politically aligned instance is accused of botting and the admin denies the claims but the evidence suggests it’s likely? What do we do with Threads or even an hypothetical Twitter going fediverse, with Elon still as the boss? Or Truth Social?

The bigger the instance, the easier it is to sneak a few votes in. With millions of user accounts, you can borrow a couple hundred of your long inactive user’s alts easily and it’s essentially undetectable.

I’m sorry for the pessimism but I’ve come to expect the worst from people. Anything that can be exploited, will be exploited. I do wish this problem to be solved, and it’s great that some people like you go ahead and at least try to make it work. I’m not trying to discourage anyone from experimenting with that, but I do think those what-ifs are important to discuss before everyone implements it and then oops we have a big problem.

The way things are, we don’t have to put any trust in an instance admin. It might as well not be there, it’s just a gateway and file host. But we can independently investigate accounts and ban them individually, without having to resort to banning whole instances, even if the admins are a bit sketchy. Because of the inherent transparency of the protocol.

The problem with this approach is trust. It works for the users, but not admins. If I run a PieFed instance with this on, how can lemmy.world for example can trust my tiny instance to be playing by the rules? I went over more details in this other comment.

Sure, right now admins can contact you, for your instance. But you can’t really do that with dozens of instances and hundreds of instances. There’s a ton of instances we tolerate the users, but would you trust the admin with anonymous votes? Be in constant contact with a dozen instance admins on a daily basis?

It’s a good attempt though. Maybe we’re all pessimistic and it will work just fine!

Plus, if you know your votes are public, maybe it’ll incentivise some people to maybe skip upvoting that kind of content. People use anonymity to say and promote absolute vile things that would never dare say or support openly otherwise.

The problem with that is, can you really trust most instances out there? If you’re a sketchy admin, it’s not that hard to convince a handful of people to use your instance and have a couple dozen anonymous votes at your disposal to influence certain topics. There’s no way to detect it, not even the other users.

That would then mean that small instances would have to prove themselves before being accepted in the wider network of instances and just end up centralizing the fediverse.

With the votes being public, while you can create as many accounts as you want, you still have to publicly use a bunch of bot accounts which makes it more easily detectable. And of course, there’s no way your instance can get away with impersonating you, because you could see it sneaking votes or comments.

I wish it could be more private, but I can’t think of a way you can prevent vote manipulation without revealing who actually voted for what or rely on trust. Another way to look at it would be, what if Lemmy didn’t use instances but instead some sort of decentralized system where each user is its own entity. How would we obfuscate the votes then? Anyone can publish a message to the network, so you need to tie it to some identity, and you circle right back to the problem.

For privacy, there’s always alt accounts and recycling accounts often. Or treat the votes as if you were commenting “+1” or “-1”.

Unless someone comes up with some crypto scheme to somehow anonymously prove that a user has voted, and has voted only once, and the user has credible history being a real person.

Personally, it’s a tradeoff I chose as the price of entry for being able to participate in this while being fully independent of some benevolent person/organization/company/private equity firm. Nobody can take away my API or my apps or shove me ads. I can post entire 4K HDR clips if I want. I can have an offline copy of it if I want to read on a plane trip. I can index Lemmy, I can search Lemmy.

I’ve not seen any, but I’m also not subscribed to the kind of communities that would be prone to it. I did still manage to get some transphobia directed at me, which is wild because I’m cis.

That’s the thing with the fediverse, every instance has a slightly different view of the thing as a whole. That’s why picking an instance that aligns with your values matters. You’re not going to see much of that on blahaj or beehaw because those users get banned quickly, and problematic instances are defederated as a whole. The matching opposite instances exist too, some are made to be safe heavens for the extreme right, with all the *ism and *phobias going on there.

I recommend people of color to pick instances that supports them, which in turn means they have admins watching their back and shutting down racism quick.

The fediverse will have every problem that plagues other social medias, and it will be worse because unlike Reddit/Twitter, there isn’t a centralized authority to say no, that’s enough. The only way to deal with it is most big instances saying no and defederating those, but it’ll never go away fully, just hidden away.

That worked but federated only this direct thread up to the fedia.io post.

Tagging @[email protected] for testing, that should make it to Mastodon and make this thread discoverable there as well.

They’d have to mention the community, then it would show up, but I don’t think it’s possible to access standalone, at least not until Lemmy lets you follow people.

I ran a YaCy instance for a while like a decade ago. It does federate index requests, and when you search it propagates the search request across a bunch of nodes. When my node came online it almost immediately started crawling stuff and it did get a bunch of search queries. But the network was still pretty small back then and the search results were… not great. That’s the price of independence from Google’s and Microsoft’s giant server farms, it’s hard to compete with that size.

But at the rate Google and Bing are enshittifying, I think it’s worth revisiting.

Using ActivityPub for this would be immensely wasteful. It’s just not feasable that all instances would have the whole index because it’s so large. Back when I tried it, the network still had several TBs worth of indexed pages. This is firmly in the realm of distributed P2P systems. One could have an ActivityPub plugin however to receive updates from social media near instantly and index those immediately with less overhead. But you still want to index wikipedia, forums, blogs, whatever the crawlers can find.

Indicates to me the decision to do ActivityPub was bolted on very late in the project’s lifecycle, probably rushed to try to take the users flocking away from Twitter.

Because a lot of those limitations makes zero sense.