One of the problems with the fediverse is that each server keeps its own copy of the content. It is definitely a worry that bad actors push content to federated servers to get them taken down due to the content they now are storing.

I think that’s the nicest way someone has ever said “touch grass” lol. I will agree though, losing access to Reddit made me realize how much mindless scrolling I would do on there. It’s difficult to see all of our comfy corners of the web crumble around us and not know what to do about it

I’ve tried Voyager and Memmy… I also know there are like a dozen others. My point still stands, we have too many devs spread out trying to make their own app/UI instead of us coming together to make one or two really good ones

I do too, ever since losing Apollo I’ve struggled to find something to fill that void. Ive tried various social media sites over the last couple of months but nothing has really stuck. Honestly not sure what to do or try at this point

I notice myself checking it less and less due to the post sorting algorithm being infuriating. E.g. I’m sorting by “Top 6 Hours” and this post from 7 months ago is in my feed

Edit: and since I’ve now commented on this post, it’ll likely bubble into other people’s feeds and they’ll be just as confused as I was

Hot take but all of the Lemmy/kbin apps. Instead of focusing dev time and resources on one or two open source apps we instead have a dozen half-baked pre-alpha apps. Lately it seems like I can’t go a day without seeing a post for a new Lemmy UI.

Or create more comment and repost bots to dilute the content even further, sure initially it’ll look like increased real engagement but it would drive more power users and content creators away

Wow I appreciate the lengthy response! So where do we go from here? Do we need to add new features that make content more discoverable? Do we need some great sorting algorithm here? Do we need a 3rd party tool that scrapes the fediverse and tells us what we might like? I’m trying to answer a bunch of questions like this. I’ve been messing with ActivityPub in my spare time to see what my implementation of it would look like. I think I have some ideas that could solve some of the issues we are seeing pop up. Honestly I’d love to have some people help me brainstorm features and architect out a system. At the end of the day… I’m on the fediverse because I don’t like Facebook, twitter, instagram, and (now) Reddit. It’s not just the people and the content on those platforms I didn’t enjoy, it’s also how they wanted you to interact with the content. I’m not looking to build a platform clone, I’m looking to build something that can fully utilize ActivityPub and can provide a feature rich experience to the user. Maybe I have too lofty of goals…idk, let me know!

That doesn’t seem impossible… I’m not sure what business logic would be needed to make them easily interoperable. Honestly the biggest complaints I’ve read about the fediverse isn’t the UIs available to view content. The issue is the bugginess of federation and the lack of content recommendation algorithms on the platforms.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of a fediverse content crawler to allow instances to mass federate content to their instance…but then like I said you also need a good recommendation algo as well.

We have a ton of dev work going into making new UIs for Lemmy but personally I think what I said above should get some love too.

@[email protected] i don’t know if there is much we can do about that though. I have read through the activity pub spec as I was considering writing a fediverse web app…I won’t disagree, it is glorified json. Unfortunately it’s the “standard” that has been loosely agreed upon. I might have the willpower to write a passion project FOSS fediverse web app but I know I couldn’t remotely begin architecting a new federation protocol as well.

I think the idea of having crossposted content is ok since you can opt in or out of seeing it, just looked through the instance though and it seems like nobody is interacting with the content at all. For me, my favorite part of the posts on Reddit was reading through the conversations in the comments. Imo, if nobody is interacting with the content that is being crossposted we shouldn’t bother with continuing to copy it over

Federation in general seems to be pretty buggy, I’m running my own instance and I can see a ton of failed jobs happening in the logs. Seems like some of the issues are short comings of the ActivityPub protocol

Should be interesting to see how the fediverse in general handles more traffic, as we’ve seen with kbin and lemmy over the last month or so there are certainly some growing pains

at least we are making the most of our new space here, we all seem to be building something fun here

Now respond to the question in the form of a song, thanks chat gpt!

Oh I wish we had the ability to fully delete our content that we’ve posted or that someone has posted of us. Illegal content is a huge concern with federation. As soon as someone pushes something like that, it gets sent to all the federated instances so they have a copy as well. That is a huge concern for instance owners (and honestly the fediverse as a whole).

I run a kbin instance and I’m a software developer for my day job. I honestly don’t have a great answer for “how do we ensure the data we request be deleted on the fediverse is actually deleted.” My best solution would for us to have several federated master databases that we maintain our federated content with. If there is a big delete flag for some content then the child instances will follow suit.

It’s no different than me sending an email to someone and then sending a request to delete it. There likely is still a copy on the email provider’s server and the recipient could have potentially backed up their emails to something outside of the email ecosystem.

Unfortunately the only way to be absolutely sure that there isn’t information you don’t want on the internet is to not share it at all. There will always be an issue of making sure every system actually deletes content when you request it. Like I said, that doesn’t stop anyone from backing up the data to another system. (E.g. Reddit archives from 2005 to now are available to download, even content that has already been deleted)

Donations seem to be plan for instances in the fediverse, I’ve heard of some other efforts to monetize instances either through advertising or subscriptions but apparently those instance were quickly defederated with.

There was a bit of technical work to stand up my own instance but developers are working on making setting up an instance easier. I haven’t had to moderate anything on my instance yet as it is <10 users at the moment but it is definitely something you have to keep in mind as your instance grows.

Yup! You can also subscribe to users and specific domains posted on an instance as well:

https://fediverse.boo/rss?magazine=news
https://fediverse.boo/rss?domain=bbc.com
https://fediverse.boo/rss?user=lohrun

So the first link would give you an RSS feed of my news magazine, the second link would give you an rss feed of any post from my instance that had bbc.com linked as the main post article, and the third link is an rss feed of all the stuff I post as a user.

Obviously it doesn’t have to be my instance you use either, you can also do https://kbin.social/rss?magazine=news for other instances as well! I’m not sure if lemmy has rss support though. It’s kind of a cool “hidden feature” that you can use to curate a RSS feed off of already curated content.

Also as a follow up @amitten, turns out you can take a kbin magazine and turn it into a RSS feed. So technically you can subscribe to my news magazine from my instance with this: https://fediverse.boo/rss?magazine=news

I’ve been posting articles that I find interesting that I think other people might enjoy over on my instance at @news I try to stay away from political posting because subreddits quickly became echo chambers with politics and I don’t want to deal with that lol.

I say come on over and check out the stuff I’m posting, if you find it interesting… I believe most of the sources I am posting have RSS feeds you can subscribe to.