I think federation and decentralization work well for email and text-messaging platforms like XMPP and Matrix because those platforms inherently benefit from being decentralized. They work almost seamlessly with federation.
Forums, on the other hand, don’t really need a federated system. Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements. When there’s that much defederation, the entire concept starts to feel pointless. Suddenly, you can’t use your account across “Lemmy” because several instances have decided they don’t like each other anymore.
If this much fragmentation is going to happen naturally, how is federation supposed to be the sustainable future of forums?
I think this is a fair criticism of federated forums. You don’t see this same level of fragmentation with email or text messaging.
Centralized but well-moderated forums are what really matter. Federation doesn’t protect good or useful speech, quality moderation does. And by its nature, Lemmy lacks that.
Glances around
I mean, it’s working just fine. 🤷♀️
I can’t see the Linux memes from .ml
I personally use Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin/etc. for social news rather than bolted on forum-like features. That’s where I think this software shines.
If you want a decentralized forum, I’d seriously recommend you look at Usenet and NNTP. Then again, I promote the usage of network protocols for what they are good at over forcing everything through the web. 😂
NodeBB I think counts more like a standard forum while still being federated?
I’ll be honest, I forget that NodeBB has become federated. Despite having run into an actual incompatibility problem between Piefed and NodeBB. 😅
Incompatibility details
So if you create a link post Piefed onto a NodeBB section, which looks like a community from my end, the link doesn’t show up.
It’s important you also understand this: You will never, ever see all the content. What you are deciding is who and what determines which content you see.
Do you want Reddit deciding that for you based on their algorithm, moderation, and other policies like API access?
Or do you want to choose based on which threadiverse community aligns with your ideals (including the option to setup your own with full federation to everyone)?
By human nature, any kind of mod system lacks the quality people dream of but it will never happen. Nobody can be truly objective or unbiased, so we wind up with the same thing whether it’s Lemmy or Reddit or any other platform. It’s the same problem no matter what.
Also, what does good or useful speech count as? Like what are we even trying to defend with that?
I will argue that the whole centralized aspect is what actually made Reddit so mainstream. Everybody has probably used it at some point by now. It just had whatever you could think of and while that seems alright, the problem with Reddit is still the corporate and tech bros controlling what gets to run on the platform. Doesn’t mean instances or comms won’t also get fed similar or their own propaganda but go figure.
Decentralization works perfectly for forums. That’s literally how the forums of the '90s worked: “Tom’s Hardware” was never the only forum for Windows issues, “Codeguru” was never the only stop fo weird Visual Basic 5 error messages, etc.
Federation is orthogonal, and can cover a number of subjects - it’s less about “what’s out there” and more about “how do we get in touch”. We have for example a sorta federated sign-in with things like OpenID. Lemmy, Mbin etc…, are built on the idea of federating the content. CDNs are literally federated caches.
You realize Reddit bans people too, right? The only difference between Reddit banning people and Lemmy.world banning people, is that Lemmy is transparent about it and gives you choices about it. On Reddit when someone gets banned they’re gone, there is no more so-called “completeness”, it’s just an illusion. But Lemmy has no such issue because you can choose who your admins are, you can join an instance that didn’t ban them.
Imagine if Reddit bans your friend, not as easy to ignore as Reddit banning a stranger, they’re gone and you have to leave Reddit entirely. On Lemmy if lemmy.world bans your friend, you can both just change which Lemmy instance you use to something more agreeable like https://lemmy.zip/
But I realize you’re probably only here to advertise your own forum. You’ve had 7 posts in the past month? And only 3 comments total? Just join the Fediverse! Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin are open source, use one of them for your server and you’ll instantly have an active userbase of over 40k. If you use Mbin (or PieFed to a lesser extent) then it also brings access to microblog posts which means many more users linked in.
I see a few “deleted” badges on your forums, I’m now upset that I can’t access ALL of the content!
I wouldn’t worry too much about OP. They’ve also been banned in the meantime.
Nah.
For starters, who will pay for the hosting and bandwidth of a monolithic Reddit knockoff? How do we prevent it from becoming another shitplug of capitalism? (We don’t, it goes exactly the way every other profit-seeking platform has gone)
And, MOST importantly: content moderation is impossible at scale; every Instance operator takes as many users as they can afford, in time and effort as well as money. The operators of monolithic sites end up doing things like hiring people in Africa and making them look at CSAM posts all day, so we don’t have to.
No, giant scale is bad. It was always bad. I have been here since 1992, you are really peddling terrible and ignorant ideas here.
Uhm, have you seen the amount of Spam, Phishing, Hacking, no replies we get on E-Mail?!? How is that working properly? It even cancels my attachments etc. And admins have to put in a massive amount of effort. Instant messenging isn’t great either. Neither is Facebook, X, TikTok and all the other central for-profit social media platforms?!!
If you wanted. You could just join an instance or create your own where nothing is defederated, am I wrong?
Is he saying federation is bad because it’s working exactly as intended?
Even that’s not an option to get what he wants, as some instances automatically block yours if you don’t block their enemies. I don’t know if there’s much of that on lemmy, but there’s tons of it on Mastodon.
That’s my whole argument, if Lemmy is going to be naturally fragmented and require a new account for every defederated instance, why not just use regular forums at that point?
If you are in a regular forum you also don’t get access to any of the lemmy communities, so what’s your point?
This one is easy, because regular forums are even more fragmented. Are you really one of those “all or nothing” people?
You don’t need an account for every defederated instance. The network is still one and whole. Defederation only hides the two instances’ activities from each other’s users, but you can use piefed.zip that doesn’t defederate from basically anything.
You will see all content defederated from lemmy.world and you will also see all content from lemmy.world.
If you use piefed.zip, you will get precisely the result you are describing you want. You will have all the Forumverse content behind one login, seamlessly.
People overall want to have a single website or app where they can access everything interesting to them.
Like, I remember being a teenager 15 years ago and regularly clicking through three, four, five different forums. I don’t have time for that anymore. The Lemmy concept allows us to have the best of both worlds: no single point of failure, but also no need to remember to click through many different websites.
Similarly, I don’t have the time from my teenager years anymore. But still wanting to keep tabs with other places, if they have RSS feeds, I can at least get them to appear in my feed here, and then jump over to comment/react. Best of both worlds indeed. 🤝
Usenet was great back in the day. Decentralized and mostly unmoderated, full of trolls but you learned to block them. It still exists but barely.
In case the OP isn’t a troll…
Do you know why aquariums need to keep oxygenated? That’s because the type of life that is put there usually needs the oxygen dilluted in the water to be able to breath. If oxygen is lacking, what’s effectively swamp water starts forming, water where few life forms can thrive.
Multiple forums I’ve seen become a metaphorical swamp water because there was barely any renewal in userbase, all the while the original userbase grew tired.
Moderation’s also a hit or a miss, and when a forum’s slowing to a halt, even a good moderation can make things worse.
OP’s discourse also makes it seem like defederation is being used rampantly and without care across the fediverse. But from my experience at least, usually it’s a last measure act, even when communities are ideological opposites.
I’ve come to the conclusion that @parallelminds@lemmy.world assumes a defedation splits the network into two islands completely isolated from each other. They don’t seem ti understand that a defederation only affects the two instances themselves, nothing else.
I am not a troll, I have put my money where my mouth is and hosted my own forum nightash.net, of which I crossposted the article here.
You’re treating federation like it creates fresh users, but it doesn’t. It lets existing users move between communities; it doesn’t guarantee new people will find or join them. Centralized forums can have user turnover too, through visibility and a larger audience.
And the aquarium analogy cuts both ways: if defederation closes the flow between communities, then the ‘oxygen’ isn’t reaching everyone anyway. Calling it a last resort doesn’t change that users on either side can lose access to each other, or that they can’t take their account with them. That’s still fragmentation, just with a nicer plumbing metaphor
Defederation would be more akin to a country cutting ties with another in international relationships, when this other country keeps causing trouble, or when making concessions for its problems makes the problems spill over or the bureaucratic cost to become too high. There’s still, in this analogy, another 200-ish countries to have relationships with.
In the oxygenating analogy, instead of just one waterwheel, oxygen-blowing tube, small waterfall, or the sort, it’s multiple ones. And if one source starts pumping CO2, motor oil, sucking up liquid instead of giving oxygen/oxygenated air to the aquarium, or whatever, this source can be cut without stopping the oxygenating.
And the nature of the protocol and the services that use it also allow people to come over from elsewhere. What I meant, far from “creating users”, is to open venues which people can find the platforms of the network, and for the people already in the network to have access to places otherwise barren, and that by interacting with, they can bump into relevance.
On linking externally, from my experience, it’s not uncommon for example in places like Pixiv for creators to link their socials, fediverse ones like Mastodon and Misskey included. You can also connect to other protocols such as Bluesky through bridges. Commercial projects such as Threads and Wordpress also have optional ActivityPub integration which would allow more people to join in or at least be aware of. And the services using the protocol are also niche-based but rarely alienating their userbases regarding other places in the network.
And on bigger forums having a larger audience, they usually do so by being so big they cannibalize competition (even if potentially not intentionally) while keeping their userbases in a walled garden. But when alternatives die out, and what’s left enshittify, people have nowhere to run. But when Reddit started going from bad to worse, a lot of people found here as an alternative. Similarly, Twitter’s at least kinda shitty since always, and very few altenatives stuck around, Mastodon being one of them.
And from what I can notice, the centralizing platforms, even the bigger ones, are either shrinking (e.g. Reddit), already shrunk (e.g. Facebook), or show indications that they may be shrinking (e.g. Discord allowing search engine indexing, and Meta allowing to sign up on Threads with their other services). And places that stay strong despite being centralizing usually offer more than just the forum experience or adjacents.
But once more, unless I’ve missed it, defederation is very sporadic. And when used, it is usually done so to keep the instance healthy within their culture.
When accounting for all defederations between all instances with at least 50 MAU (as of when I last checked in August, at least), the only instances that are defederated with over 5% of other Threadiverse users (inbound or outbound) are lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, fedinsfw.app, forum.guncadindex.social, and lemmy.1095.me, none of which are oriented towards the average user moving over from Reddit anyhow.
Less defederation on average is better, but defederation is not a huge problem as it stands, particularly if you pick an instance known to use it minimally such as lemmy/piefed.zip.
Just look at Lemmy and how many communities defederate from one another because of ideological disagreements
Lol…
Decentralizing isn’t good if you want everyone in the same spot, that is correct…
But why does everyone need crammed together?
Some people just don’t vibe, if no one wants to federate with an instance, they don’t have to.
I’ll never understand why people who grew up with big social media are so hung up up on this idea that one platform has to host everyone.
Like, a shit ton of fractured forums was the norm for decades, long before Facebook, twitter, or insta. Everyone going to the same place is a new thing, and if people are here it’s because they didn’t think it worked out.
You don’t, you think it’s great for insanely wealthy tech ros to control every conversation.
Cool.
Go there, none of us care
Because people expect a seamless experience? I don’t want to browse a fragmented platform either, which is kind of the point: if I have to pick an instance, hunt for communities, and hope they federate with the places I care about, what exactly is Lemmy improving over regular forums?
If fragmentation is the feature, regular forums already did that without pretending they’re one platform. You see my point?
People should not expect a seamless experience across totallly different communities of people. Reddit is not a seamless experience. Rules and norms are different across subs.
The internet works better with fragmentation. It always has. Trying to treat everything as homogenous is stifling.
Buddy…
Because people expect a seamless experience?
You want a seamless experience…
And I already told you what to do for that:
Go there, none of us care
If that’s what anyone here wanted, they wouldn’t be here…
Why does one place not being how you want it, mean that it should change to be like everywhere else? And especially when you seemingly don’t want to go to any of the many options that are already like that?
Do you legitimately not understand the responses this is getting?
If you don’t like it, go back to reddit. But you’re not going to convince anyone on the fediverse that the fediverse should be more like reddit. The few people that would agree with you, have already made these same posts, gotten the same responses, and went back to reddit.
How are you surprised the people who stay here like it?
Fair enough if that’s what you would like. But for the rest of us, yes we’re looking for a seamless anti-echo chamber experience, the mirror opposite of Reddit.
People who join the forum threadiverse and actually stay are likely ok with how federation affects the experience. The ones who don’t like it eventually leave and go back to centralized ones. Pushing to centralize something that has decentralization as its primary purpose is pointless. “The rest of us” isn’t accurate based on the interactions you’re getting in this post. It’s you who is the outlier.
Centralizing platforms aren’t necessarily seamless either. Having the same general contents propagating around, but different sites to seeing them, allows for creating the ideal experience to a given user, and each user expecting different things for an ideal experience.
Like in my case, I’m in Mbin, which would look like the least feature-complete of the fediverse softwares at first glance. But besides actually having what it takes to make a functional forum, it can bring together microblog and thread posts, and the lack of visual noise in the UI while the UI also being overall text-oriented help me focus. Plus it’s very responsive to scripts when a feature isn’t natively available. And I can connect to other sites thanks to RSS-tracking and protocol-bridging bots.
And from it, jumping to other forums such Twitter, Retropie and GOG’s becomes seamless too.
For me, that is an example of seamlessness.
Looks like that’s not really true seeing how you are calling people, who are not in your echo chamber of “defederation breaks the experience”, morons.
But for the rest of us,
No one here agrees with you,
The freedom and control I am able to have over what I see vastly outweighs the inconvenience of not having access to all the content always
In fact, I was there for the early days of reddit, I was there before that when most of the internet was a series of disconnected forums. I preferred it, just like I prefer Lemmy. it’s easier to find niche communities where you may make real friends.
You don’t have to agree with me, but ya, no, I hard disagree with you.
Well, personally I’m coming from the angel where I want to see everything first and then judge for my self second.
Then why are you on .world? There are plenty of instances that are widely federated.
Because I want to see everything, including lemmy.world.
If centralized but well moderated forums are what matter, paraphrasing the end of the opening post, wouldn’t it be better to leave Lemmy / the fediverse though?
Why do you then not move to an instance that offers that to you?
Because that would be a category error. I want see everything includes all places all the time.
I did not understand properly what you meant with this comment. Could you paraphrase, please?
“I want to see everything” means that I want to see even the places that in theory I have no business being in.
I judge for myself plenty, but I’ve also been on the internet long enough to know I don’t owe everyone my ears/eyes. I know how to find the information/communities I want to find - I’d rather seek out what I want to see than sift through that which I do not want to see.
Good enough, wise enough.
