First of all, how is called this category of programs, instance engine?
Second, why there are 3 different, basically inter-compatible projects out there, what are the benefits of each one over the others? and why does Lemmy prevail all of them.
*i will be using feddit as a umbrella term for all the reddit-like fediverse.
I don’t have much of a technical Background to know how this things work under the hood, but I’m quite curious of where all of this is heading.
I see a lot of awesome features locked away in these other projects that would be just nice if it was standard to have them, like piefed’s hashtag-like system that allows people to seek things by topic instead of going to a specific community hosted in a specific instance, it would instantly fix the fragmentation problem across feddit, lol.
How the future of feddit will be? will be all be using Lemmy or other specific project, or instances will use whatever project they like and they will be cross compatible enough that it won’t be much of a deal what project is running underneath?
Wow. I respect your opinion, which was obviously carefully considered, and I completely disagree with your perspective about instances being a dead end.
As instances are currently structured, they are tied to web domain, and actually owned by somebody somewhere. That somebody has a level of commitment having setup hosting and configured the server itself, and likely to want to not lose their toys. If that somebody refuses to enforce order in their instance, they can be defederated. Thus, bad actors incur risk. There is power in this structure.
This is all public. Somebody owns it. It goes back to real people, who can have real consequences if they do bad things.
There’s a lot of people out there doing bad things. I don’t see a lot of that here.
I’ve seen a lot of crappy ways to organize people on the internet.
This one seems to work alright. For now.
In this system, the people that simply want to access the web MUST trust the server owner and the people that want to have full control over their identity MUST setup their own server.
This is complex, fragile, expensive and a huge barrier of entry. Just this week the admins of the second largest lemmy instance are closing down their server and 5000 people are left with no choice but to move on from their identity and find a new home.
Email doesn’t have that. The WWW doesn’t have that. Phone networks doesn’t have that. Bluesky doesn’t have that.
I’ve read your posts and believe I understand your stance. I fundamentally disagree.
This thing that you call a barrier to entry … I call it commitment and willinness to place your nuts on the line. These things are the basis of polite society. When they are allowed to work, they truly do so, and communities result. People with skin in the game act better. Instances provide governance in a natural, oganic way (despite your claim that its unnatural) that fallls directly from the structure.
You’ve made other points about needing fealty to an instance of people you don’t know up front and trusting your admins.
Yup. You are joining a social group. This is the natural order of things. Don’t like it, or want to tinker? Spin up your own.
It’s interesting to clearly understand your point, find you to be reasonable, and entirely disagree. :)
What skin in the game is required from someone to create an account on lemmy.world or mastodon.social? Conversely, what type of “bad consequences” is there for some admin that sets up an instance and fails to manage it properly? There isn’t any.
There is nothing organic about instances because there is no natural limit to how big they can get. The cost per user on an instance grows sub-linearly with the amount of users in an instance. This is why we are ending up with this power-law distribution and the majority of users go to the “flagship” instances and the minority spread around on micro-instances.
Social connections and the relationships are only meaningful if they have some shared context. Your family/extended family, the people you’ve went to school with, your swimming team mates, your co-workers, your neighbors, etc. But once we go past a certain scale (Dunbar’s Number) people start seeing individuals and just treat everyone else as interchangeable masses of crowds.
The absolute majority of people are only looking at social media platforms as a means to something. They don’t care whether they found the information they were looking for on Reddit, or lemmy.world or piefed.social. They don’t care if they are avoiding boredom at the subway by scrolling videos on Instagram, TikTok or loops. If we keep demanding people to understand the power dynamics each instance just before joining or tell them, they will just turn their heels over to the status quo.
Thanks for your reply. At every point I feel the opposite, and I think its obvious.
I explained a couple times. So did you. I really feel I get you.
And you’re … well … not wrong, but there’s something missing about how you evaluate social dynamics.
The only way to get people to behave is to leverage their petty bullshit to make them behave.
It could all fall over under sustained assault, but as Lemmy currently stands, instances and admin hold back the tide of crap that is everywhere else on the net.