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!
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.