Ramin Honary

And once they control the media, no one will ever again have to worry about learning the truth when military and/or police commit war crimes like genocide, or murder protesters at demonstrations, or when the cops murder people for not having the correct skin color, and so on.

And no, they don’t speak to one another / find one another or are able to follow / like / reply to one another as one is told the Fediverse works.

This is true, it is a problem, but maybe not as big a problem as you think.

Kbin combines the data model of both Lemmy and Mastodon so Kbin can interact with both of them perfectly. Mastodon can interact in a limited way with Lemmy. Frendica and Pixelfed also work fairly well with Mastodon, so Kbin should be able to interact with both of those as well, although I have never tried. PeerTube is probably the least compatible, although I can upvote and post comments on PeerTube videos using my Mastodon account, and follow PeerTube accounts on Mastodon. But I can’t create new PeerTube posts on Mastodon. I hope in time all of these different app services will be able to interact with each other more.

The most difficult thing right now is moderation tools. Right now, banning instances is very coarse, and it also deletes the entire social graph between instances, so people who were following each other lose their connections with each other, even after the ban is removed.

There are people working on solving that problem right now, but it might be a little while before the changes are spread throughout the network.

What I would like most is if I can create one ActivityPub account and use it on every ActivityPub service. This for me would be a perfect solution, because then I could use any app using a single account. I would also like to see it possible to ban instances temporarily without losing social connectivity, and I would like to see better moderation tools for individual user accounts being banned by an instance.

There are 500 million posts on Twitter every day. Do you read them all? There are 2.8 million subreddits. Have you browsed them all? The internet is big. You’re not going to be able to follow everything everywhere all at once.

That is not really the point though. Suppose there are 2.8 million forums on Kbin or Lemmy. If you join an instance of any ActivityPub app, can you talk to any of those 2.8 million? Can you interact with all of the precise subset of forums that interest you? You can choose an instance to join, but you have to know ahead of time all the instances you want to interact with, and your interests might change over time. Or you have to create and maintain multiple accounts.

This isn’t exactly sustainable for individual users.

This lack of a shared reality with the scores is going to hamper lemmy as a reddit alternative if there isn’t some kind of standard or attempt to foster a “true score” across all instances.

No, not really. You should keep in mind that the vote scores on Reddit and other similar forums are fake scores as well. All forms of online voting are fake to some degree.

Reddit also does various manipulations during vote counting prior to showing you a score. For example, they may not count scores from accounts that are too new or has too little other activity, in order to avoid scores manipulated by sock puppet accounts. And it is entirely possible, maybe even likely, that Elon Musk directly controls the vote count on X/Twitter posts to his liking.

So I don’t think voting is really all that important anyway. It may be important on centralized websites like Reddit, but it has always been something of a lie. It is just that on a federated forum the lie becomes more obvious.

Personally, I never take voting on the fediverse seriously, and I don’t think anyone else should either. I mean, I do upvote, but I use it more as an acknowledgement, more than a means to try to boost someone’s comment over others.

I have no expertise in how ActivityPub works, but my guess is it works something like this:

You make a post on instance A, you can view it on instance B. People all over the fediverse, instances C through Z are voting on your post.

The venn diagram of other instances with which instance A and instance B federate overlap but are not exactly the same. There are instances federated with instance A not visible to instance B, there are instances federated with instance B not visible to instance A.

The vote count for a post is counted by instance A and B based on which instances with which they federate. That means instance A is counting votes from instances that B cannot see, and instance B is counting votes from instances that A cannot see.

Where the Venn diagrams overlap, both instances will agree on the vote count. But the vote counts coming from instances that they don’t both federate with will cause a difference in vote count.

I saw the “502 Gateway” HTTP error message, but I never even closed my browser tab. I refreshed again today and Lemmy.ml was back online! Thanks for your hard work!

5-E’s maybe:

• Embrace
• Extend
• Exploit
• Extinguish
• Enshittification

I also wrote a blog post on it,

We are forming communities on the realized image of the internet that we were told we would have back in the 80s and 90s.

Exactly! Back in the 80s, tech enthusiasts would run their own dial-up message boards in their homes. The Fediverse is like that, but with all the benefits of modern technology. Anyone can run their own instance if they have a decent internet connection (usually fiber). But it is more than just message boards: they can run Lemmy, Mastodon, Wordpress, and even things like Tor and NextCloud, and instantly contribute their computing resources to the larger Fediverse community.

Exactly. No human community exists without infighting. Infighting is not a good thing, but it is a good sign – a sign of growth.