Square Singer

That happens if you don’t have an actual legal team… I am sure they are doing their best, but if you don’t have a lawyer, you can’t do legal texts.

Sorry, no condescension intended.

Your post read like one written by someone with very minimal knowledge about the subject, which might have been a misunderstanding on my part. So I tried to cover the basics before talking about the rest.

There is really no shame in asking questions about something where you don’t have experience. There are far more topics I have no idea about than there are topics where I do have a deep understanding.

So to get on the same page, I’ll summarize what I understood, please correct me if you mean something different.

• You don’t like ActivityPub, you want a new protocol
• The system should make it easy to create new, small instances
• The instances should share sessions with the other instances (=single sign on) based on trusting them
• You prefer a centralized system?
• You want the system to not use a single protocol (ActivityPub), but use multiple protocols?
• ActivityPub based services have bad UX due to the complexity of the protocol

Is this correct?

We have a few contradictions here.

You cannot have a system where anyone can easily create servers and at the same time have shared sessions based on trust. These two requirements conflict with each other.

Either servers only work with servers they trust, and then you can’t just create a new small server and interact with the network.

Or anyone can easily create a new small server, but then you can’t do anything based on trust, since you never know if that server was created with malicious intent.

Regarding centralized/decentralized you have to differentiate between implementation and management.

All major social networks run distributed systems. If you want to serve billions of users, you need to run millions of servers. These servers are distributed around the globe to give fast access to users everywhere. Chances are pretty high that your ISP has a few racks of Facebook, Netflix, YouTube and Tiktok servers.

Their distributed system is orders of magnitude more complex than everything running ActivityPub combined.

But their system works, because they have tens of thousands of highly paid specialists to make them work.

ActivityPub based services on the other hand have almost no funding and manpower.

Mastodon is the best in this respect. They have 6 people who are actually working on the system.

Lemmy has two developers who earn close to minimum wages.

Kbin has a single guy developing it.

That’s the real reason why the UX is crap.

If anything, ActivityPub and the services running on them are extremely underengineered and underdeveloped.

Btw, there is something rather close to what you seem to want: online forums with Google single sign on.

The forums are not interacting at all with other forums. No federation or anything at all. There are enough commercial solutions that work really well. And with Google Single Sign On you also don’t have to register for each forum.

E-mail. E-mail does support small servers.

Btw, I think you are mixing up a few topics here, so let’s see what you actually want.

• Protocols are what computers use to communicate with each other. No protocols means no interaction between different computers/servers. Without protocols, none of the things you ask for can be possible.
• Federated services don’t have single sign on. On the contrary, single sign on is a centralized service not a distributed one. To clarify that: I cannot log into lemmy.world with my feddit.de accout, same as I cannot log into hotmail with my gmail account. In both cases I log into my instance/provider and this allows me to communicate with people on other instances/providers. Federation is the process of sharing content between instances. SSO on the other hand is a centralized service that then communicates with other services to let you log into these other services. For example, I can log into my Google account and then use this to login to other sites. This only works because people trust Google. This would not work as a decentralized service with untrusted servers.
• Duplication is used on federated services for a few reasons. First, it’s a kind of caching mechanism distributing the load. If someone posts something on one instance, it’s transferred only once to the other instances which then serve it to all their users. Without duplication, each individual view would have to be requested again from the original instance. The other advantage is that the admins of all the instances retain control over the content. If the other instance goes offline, users can still see “their” copy of the content. And if the other instance doesn’t moderate their content, the mods/admins of your instance can do that themselves.

So as you see, these concepts aren’t there just for fun, but for a purpose.

There are two issues with that:

• The GDPR notice on feddit.de is not GDPR compliant, and the link isn’t even visible on mobile.
• If you request deletion, they can’t guarantee that the data is deleted on federated servers. They can send deletion messages, but federation is constantly not working correctly, other instances can decide themselves whether they do delete stuff, and if an instance is unreachable for a while, the deletion message will be dropped.

Lemmy, or even ActivityPub are designed to be non-GDPR compliant. (Probably not on purpose, but the way it works makes it basically impossible to be GDPR compliant.)

That already exists. The person who created a post or comment can delete it. But it only works sometimes, since federation is constantly not working correctly.

That’s true, but neither the article nor the discussion are about ActivityPub.

Both are specifically about Lemmy, and Lemmy does have private messages.

And the content of private messages.

How about private messages which are also unencrypted?

It’s actually not wrong if you look at it in another way.

• Big tech will abuse your data, but it will do within legal constraints, and there is actuall (though weak) accountability of these companies due to the legal system.
• On federated services like Lemmy, instances are hosted by anonymous individuals. Most social media laws don’t apply to them, and their legal accountability is basically zero.
• Lemmy, for example, does not comply with GDPR. There is no legal notice, no privacy contact person, no banner asking whether you are ok with the fact that your data is sent to unknown servers in random nations, no nothing. Private messages aren’t even encrypted, so any admin can read them without issues.
• There is no way to actually delete your data, as the GDPR requires. Deleted posts are only marked as deleted and you can see their plain text content by just pressing the “reply” button in any of the apps. There isn’t any kind of guarantee, that your post will be deleted on other instances. If federation has problems, the post will remain on other instances and is now permanently undeletable by the user.
• There are no moderation standards. Some instances will delete nazi content, some basically require nazi content. And some instance admin might even edit your posts to say something completely different. It’s all possible and in the hands of random people on the internet.
• Hobbyist-run services are much worse when it comes to availability and reliability. If something happens while the admin is on holiday, nothing will get fixed. If the admin runs out of money, doesn’t care anymore or even dies, the instance with all it’s content and users is just gone.

So there are very real risks attached to a hobbyist-run service with no legal accountability and no transparency at all.

We all know the downsides of Big Tech though, so it’s everyone’s personal choice to figure out which disadvantages hurt them personally more.

Emails also go to other’s servers.

But you could just host an IRC server.

But as soon as you interact with literally anyone (or anyone interacts with you) your data is still replicated on other servers.

The internet can be forever. If you mess up publicly enough, it will be forever (e.g. the aerial picture of Barbara Streisand’s villa)

Nebula. Most of they content creators I watch are there.

If they really block adblockers, I will subscribe. To Nebula. It’s got everything I want, adfree (including sponsored segments), extra content and is cheaper. And the content creators get a bigger share of the money.

Are they dumb? Interfaces with publicly available documentation doesn’t mean that they don’t have access control/authentication.

Hiding the documentation doesn’t actually change anything security-wise, except that nobody can review these interfaces.

Hackers are gonna hack, no matter if they have a documentation or not.

Simutrans. It’s old but really good. It’s really easy to lose 10h or so in it before you notice the time.

For me, GTA has always been like “I can play the story and get a car as a reward, or I can just steal a car”. So I always start to steal my way up, until the cops become too powerful. Then it turns into a senseless shootout and once I’m dead, the game is done for me.

It’s fun for an hour or so, and that’s that then.

I totally agree with BotW. So many people seem to love it, but it’s just lots of empty land, boring/non-existent characters/story. It’s just empty and there are no real pointers where to go.

Also, Zelda without dungeons doesn’t feel right at all, and the shrines aren’t a suitable replacement.

Ahm, no ;)

Both JS and Python are neither efficient nor easier in the long-term. They are both languages that were primarily built to make quick-and-dirty small and simple programs/scripts.

Both are really slow and inefficient (though Python is much slower than JS nowadays). Both are dynamic languages which opens then up for all sorts of dirty hacks and are pretty negative for maintainability.

Because of that, both languages have unofficial typing support (Typescript and Mypy) to make programs in these languages somewhat maintainable.

If you are looking for performance, the first tier is natively compiling languages like C/C++/Rust/Go. The second tier are languages that compile to bytecode and run on heavily optimized runtime environments like anything running on the JVM or C# or therelike. And the worst tier are super dynamic languages like JS or Python.

That is true, that was an issue on Reddit as well. But here it’s even worse, since you can have a community with the same name on different instances. It basically adds another dimension to the discoverability issue.