lohrun

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’ve had a couple pieces of software revoke my lifetime licenses when they switched to fully subscription (even though they swore lifetime license holders would be grandfathered). I get needing to make money to pay your software engineers to keep pushing out updates but man I hate this subscription hell we live in now

That’s just how it goes now it seems, we just have to go with the lesser of the evils for everything. Sure there is FOSS for some stuff but even then FOSS has its fair share of issues

Oof best of luck to you guys on .ml instances, might be worth looking at buying a domain as a backup to migrate to. Don’t wanna be caught off guard like this especially if they are trying to recoup all their urls. I went with a .boo domain to be unique for my instance but there are loads of TLDs out there

Web 3.0 - users, kindly go fuck yourselves p.s. pay us subscription money and view lots of ads

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.

@jeff@federated.fun 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.

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

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)