this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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So when beehaw says they're degenerating from
sh.itjust.worksandlemmy.world, the way that works is that any content from those specific servers will not be ingested into beehaw's view of the fediverse. That includes content and comments. It's identical to how if a Mastodon instance setup for LGBTQ communities and a Mastodon instance set up for far right extremists decided to defederate from each other, they would just never see any content that originated from each other's servers. Sincekbin.socialis notsh.itjust.worksorlemmy.world, we should be fine in sharing back and forth with those communities, and becausekbin.socialhasn't defederated from those servers, content will flow back and forth between them fine. beehaw users should be able to see content fromkbin.socialminus any contributions from the defederated servers.It's a very powerful tool in toolbox for the Fediverse, and one that absolutely brings an eye to the moderation of servers when it's used. I think it's a bit of a bigger deal in this part of the Fediverse right now because there aren't a ton of options yet for federated link aggregators; it's pretty trivial now to move to a different Mastodon server if you disagree with the instances being defederated from the one you're on. That said, it's very much a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing; I think that it's fantastic that servers are able to engage or disengage with whomever they want. Most will get along just fine and it's not really an issue.
I also think that as part of a "community taking back the internet from billionaires" movement, defederation is one of our most powerful tools. If Meta comes into the scene and starts scraping the Fediverse and building marketing profiles and training their AI chatbots on our data, it'll take about 3 minutes until people are maintaining a blocklist on git* for all server administrators to simply block Meta from accessing the majority of the Fediverse. There is a challenge in deciding what the scope of "generally acceptable behaviour" is, but we did it before centralized social media and we can do it again. If anything, I think some of the challenges of the last 10-20 years was this idea that diametrically opposed communities should occupy the same "space" on the internet. Get a big general pool, and give flexibility for communities to push in a direction they want if they want to go outside that space.
Some of these things will iron themselves out as more instances of lemmy or kbin or whatever decides to interoperate with these two spin up. In the end, I think these are tools that allow us to develop healthier communities. In the long game, it won't matter for any one server if they can't access beehaw because good content will be distributed amongst a ton of servers. And if the people from
lemmy.worldorsh.itjust.worksreally want that beehaw content, then they can work to address some of the issues that beehaw feels are worth defederating them for!Thank you very much for this insightful, lengthy reply. I think it’s a great feature. My initial concern was ensuring continued engagement in the early stages of this experiment. I got very excited yesterday when everything seemed to open up and there was content out there, and got concerned when I woke up this am when Beehaw pulled the lever to shut out some instances. They are well within their rights. Just want to make sure this whole community isn’t going to croak before it gets a chance to find out what’s it’s defacto rules are
Oh, definitely understandable. It takes a little while to wrap your head around how all this actually works. I learned most of it with the Twitter exodus when I moved to Mastodon. Once you do get it, though...it's kind of like taking the red pill and realizing how railroaded the internet has actually been for the last 15 years. I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.
Technology -- and the efforts of open source developers -- got to the point where we can make Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters and GoodReads and Instagrams and more that can run on a server anyone's willing to spin up, and content no longer needs to be gated to one community thanks to the ActivityPub standard.
And think of it this way: a piece of content on kpub is really no different than a piece of content on Pixelfed or Mastodon. They're all embedded within an ActivityPub "container" that has a standard form. All these websites exist now not because you have to be super-specific in how to read the content, but rather to craft experiences that are optimized for different types of content. kbin has microblogs, which is really just Twitter/Mastodon. Some will like it here, others will find the experience that a dedicated microblogging client like Mastodon far more favourable for viewing that kind of content. When sharing a photo on Pixelfed, you can assign licenses, attributions, and locations, which makes sense given its intent to be a photography website. You don't really need that for a lot of images shared here or on Mastodon , but all that info is stored inside the exact same ActivityPub "container" as a link you put on here; nothing is stopping kbin or Mastodon from reading that data, or being able to write it if they wanted to. At the end of the day, it's all the same stuff, and you just need the application you're building to interact with the right parts.
That's why you can do things like follow people from entirely different "platforms" on other Fediverse platforms. For example, here's someone I saw trending on Pixelfed who had some nice pictures: Charlie as viewed from kbin. It may not be ideal following them here -- it might not be the optimal experience for photo sharing -- but you can do it. Likewise, you can boost content from one "platform" into another.
The more I learn about it all, the more I find it impressive how forward-looking and comprehensive the ActivityPub standard was. And I'm sure it will flex and expand as needed heading forward.
Last thing I'll say because I'm way too wordy...one of the things I did when I was learning all this was set up a similar username on multiple accounts. I'm on here, Mastodon, Bookrastinating, and Pixelfed. I put a 💬 after my display name on Mastodon, a 📖 after my display name on Bookrastinating, and a 📷 after my display name on Pixelfed. From my Mastodon account, I followed my Bookrastinating and Pixelfed accounts. Now I post content into the relevant platform that's optimized for it: Mastodon for microblogs, Bookrastinating for reading stuff, and Pixelfed for photos. Those communities naturally develop interest for those specific types of content. But now, if I post a picture on Pixelfed that I really think my followers on Mastodon would like, I can just boost the content into my Mastodon feed. Not a link to the content, but the actual content itself. And it can move on into that community as well. I'm content right now having these different places optimized for different types of content, but on a technology stack that allows that content to seamlessly transition between applications. It's great!
I completely agree! The potential is absolutely there and so far I can't see how corporations will ruin it this time. However, I'm trying to be cautious, because I recall how excited people were for blockchain to revolutionize everything, only for that to turn out worse than useless. Granted, the problems there were fairly evidence from the beginning and there were plenty of naysayers. The Fediverse is too new and obscure to get the same kind of scrutiny yet, I think.
If everything goes as I think it could, we may look back at the 2010-2025 years as the first true 'dark era' of the information age.
@buffaloseven do you mind if I pick your brain? Why does kbin have microblogs AND threads, and why do some magazine have only microblogs? Is that an admin choice?
I'm not super-familiar with the inner workings of kbin yet; my gut reaction is that if a magazine only has microblogs, it's because nobody's made threads in it yet? I don't think there's an option to prevent threads in a magazine.
@buffaloseven thanks :)
It's definitely possible to actively use this place without wrapping your head around the how of it, but it's unfortunate that it's part of the experience, which is intimidating to new users. Hopefully Lemmy and Kbin become more mature and easier to use from the start without using your brain.
I actually don't think it's unfortunate, but mostly because the technology needs a shakedown period. Having some barriers that will keep out less technically savvy, or even just the less motivated to learn, allows the people that are more invested to work out the kinks and build something valuable.
Think of the coming months and years as the incubation period that Reddit had before the great exodus from Digg made it a much more mainstream place on the web. The only reason all of the people fleeing Digg went to Reddit is because it already existed with its own community that was (mostly) able to help absorb and train the incoming waves.
We've seen the same thing on Lemmy and Kbin, where people that had already been around are helping others adjust. Eventually the user experience, the differences and similarities between instances, probably some consolidation and splits of communities between and across instances... all of that will be happening as more and more people join.
(If I'm being honest, I would be perfectly fine with some of these barriers remaining in place forever. I don't necessarily need to interact with a billion people to meet my news, hobby and curiosity needs.)
It's possible to use this place without developing an understanding of how it works, but you'll experience a lot of friction if you end up in some kind of edge case.
Like, with the Twitter migration, it became clear that a lot of people's mental model for federation was actually a mainframe/terminal model, which makes questions like "Why can't I search posts on [other site]?!?" make sense if you don't recognize that [other site] is a different website. Once you grok that, it becomes like asking why you can't search Facebook posts from etsy. But the mainframe model actually posits that there's a singular place (called "Mastodon" to Twitter migrants, and "Lemmy" or "kbin" for newcomers from Reddit) that you're accessing via some kind of dumb terminal, and certain things (discovery, defederation, etc.) will just appear fundamentally broken when viewed through that lens.
Beehaw is big enough to be self-sustaining -- they don't allow users to create subforums there -- and it only takes a few hundred active users to actually create a self-sustaining community.
They have thousands.
At the same time, they only have like 10% of active Lemmy/kbin users. The rest of us will also be fine. People are mostly just irked because they have very active gaming and technology forums, and people are still habituated to seeking out the biggest community on a topic and treating it like it's the only one that matters.
This is an opportunity for everyone else to understand the importance of not relying on single points of failure -- this is the fundamental lesson behind the Reddit and Twitter migrations that people mostly haven't really processed yet -- and to subscribe to multiple manageable communities on topics they care about, and to treat them as communities, and not just a faceless content stream.
Ooh, a learning experience. That’s a great way to frame it
This is confusing to me as well.
Where I still struggle is in the details of defederation for a service like kbin because it's more interactive than Mastodon. Here are some examples that confuse me.
For these, let's assume we have Servers A, B, and C. Server A has defederated from (i.e. blocked) Server B, but otherwise they are all connected to each other.
Anyone who can shed light on this will be greatly appreciated. :-)
The fediverse has, generally, done a very poor job of explaining itself and how it works. There's a huge disconnect between most peoples' mental model of the space, and what actually happens.
During the Twitter migration, the mental model that people seemed to have was that of a mainfarme. That is, that "Mastodon" lived in one specific place, and that everyone was just "logging on" to it via portal, or dumb terminal.
Here, people seem to be better understanding that things live on multiple different websites -- in big part, I think, due to remote community/mamgazine names having the full address shown in the sidebars (Mastodon's UI goes to some lengths to hide when people are on other instances). But how it ends up looking is that you are viewing remote websites through your local instance, kind of as if your local instance is a Fediverse web browser. In this sense, viewing, say, [email protected] is the equivalent of browsing to a separate website and viewing or interacting with that content directly.
This is not what happens, though.
Really, that's not what happens with Firefox or Chrome, either. When using a web browser, you request content from a remote computer (the web server), that content gets downloaded and stored on your local hard drive as your browser cache, and then you view the local copy of of that page. If the website is dynamic in some sense, updates from that website get repeatedly pushed to your computer.
This is also how federation works here.
When you view [email protected] from, say, lemmy.world, or kbin.social, if you pay special attention to the address bar, you'll notice you're actually viewing kbin.social/m/[email protected]. That's a magazine hosted locally on kbin.social. All of the posts and comments you see there are stored locally on kbin.social; when you engage with them, you're merely engaging with a local copy. These copies remain synchronized with other sites by passing messages back and forth.
Defederation is just refusing to accept messages from, or send messages to, a certain website.
With this in mind:
This is likely correct, yes. Server C will likely send a message to Server A with the comment, but Server A will not have the post in order to properly assign it, so it will probably just get dropped.
No. Server A is not sending messages to Server B, so Server B does not get the post, and the copy of the community that is mirrored on Server B will never be updated with that post.
Server A will receive the messages send by Server C, so the original post, and the comment originating on Server C. It will have blocked the comment from Server B, though, so it will not know what to do with the comment from Server C. The comment from Server C will include metadata that tells Server A that it's a reply to a comment that Server A doesn't have a record of. So, in all likelihood, the comment will get dropped on Server A.
Thank you!!! This is exactly what I needed. I really appreciate the thoughtful and thorough reply.
Don't mention it. It all clicked for me when I set up a Calckey instance and explored the database. It really hammered home that everything in this space is local. Remote users have entires in the user table. Rmeitr posts are stored right along side those originating elsewhere. Everything I looked at, everyone I spoke to, it was all there.
And with that, the entire project snapped into focus, and all of the weird quirks of the space made perfect sense.
Everything is local. Anything that looks otherwise is an illusion.
Hi,
New here and still learning the ropes. With lemmyworld being defedrated and the way activitypub works, can I still post to, interact with(up vote, down vote) and subscribe to instances originating from beehaw? Or would being federated put all people who log in from lemmy.world on a block list from interacting with the communities and only being able to view?
Cheers.
None of the content from beehaw.org would update on lemmy.world, so if you (a lemmy.world user) subscribed to a beehaw community, no posts would ever be sent unless beehaw refederated lemmy.world. Essentially beehaw's server is not talking to lemmy.world in any way currently
Is that right? I thought federation was a two-way street. Lemmy.world hasn’t defederated beehaw, so wouldn’t posts from there still be visible? Lemmy.world users would be able to comment, but none of their comments would be visible to beehaw users, no…?
This is correct as far as I understand. Content from Beehaw can appear on other instances still federated to it, but content from those instances will not make its way back to users that are viewing the community from Beehaw.
To further what rideranton said, the way federation works is by mirroring content across different websites. You're interacting with copies of posts and comments that have been sent to lemmy.world, and when you reply to someone, or post in a remote community, all of that is happening locally. You're exclusively engaging with the local copy of everything.
When sites are federated, they then sync up their content. If they defederate, that syncing merely stops occurring.
Let's say there are five websites all federating, A, B, C, D, and E. There's a popular community, Junk, on B that people on all 5 websites use. This means all 5 sites house a local copy of Junk, and whenever someone posts to Junk their local site pushes those posts out to the other 4.
But one day, B defederates from A, because they decide that there are too many assholes on A. Now, anything people on B post to Junk just never reach A, and similarly anything people on B post to Junk never gets sent to A. But A is still communicating with C, D, and E. Their updates still flow out to those 3 other websites, and updates form them continue to flow back. Similarly, B is still in communication with C, D, and E, so they stay in sync as well. And really, from sites C, D, and E, it kind of looks like nothing happened (though if people pay close enough attention, they may notice that people from A never comment on posts from people using B, and vice versa).
Now, users on A may still be able to see posts and comments from users on B if they arrive on A via C, D, or E, but it won't work the other way: Because site B has explicitly blocked traffic from site A, any content whose author is on site A will be filtered out when syncing with C, D, or E.
That makes it a lot easier to understand. I was confused on how messages propagated. Your last paragraph is what cleared it up for me. Won't this lead to strange comment chains? You could have a hundred different people commenting on a chain and they're all a mix of federated and Def federated instances. Some will see some comments and others will see other comments but none will see all the comments unless they're completely federated with all the sites. This is where it loses me. Not that I don't understand what's happening, it's I don't understand how it's supposed to work in a threaded environment. I guess once I start seeing in an action I'll get a better grasp of it. I don't think this is going to work out as well as it was intended to.
Cheers.
It absolutely can lead to odd comment chains, depending on how filtering is handled. I'm not sure how either Lemmy or kbin do that, though. The easy solution is for site B to filter out posts or comments from site A, and every comment that follows in the chain.
The defederation shouldn't affect users of kbin.social in any way, beehaw isn't defedarating from this instance.