Anil DashBleh. Just saw a friend who found out they couldn’t be followed by one of their friends because (unbeknownst to both parties) the moderators of their friend’s instance had defederated from their own instance. All of this, for people who barely know what any of these terms mean. What they experience is, “Two people you’ve never met have a beef you’ve never heard about over an issue you don’t know about, so your friend can’t see you. And there’s no fix.” It’s just terrible all around.
skippy@anildash More self-hosted instances, please. More techie friends hosting for their less-techie friends, please. More local communities, please.
Rob Bellinger@rbellinger @anildash GoToSocial is wonderful. SQLite database file, single executable binary, low resource consumption and extremely reliable. You can deploy it easily to fly.io or on a cloud VPS or on your own computer somewhere. Highly recommended.
JoYo
Andy L.@anildash This is why I've always been dubious of the claim that "The threat of defederation will cause instances to behave correctly and put the work into moderation."
It's too blunt of a threat. Too binary. Once you threaten it, you've either got to follow through and ruin things for everybody, or you've got to back down and let people be terrible.
It's like a barkeeper who thinks he doesn't need a bouncer because he has a shotgun behind the bar.
izzy :: izjustpixels ✨@anildash I ran into a similar issue when I migrated this account away from mastodon.art, ironically because that instance kept severing ties with other instances.
I knew where I wanted to migrate to... And then noticed that that was one of the instances that mastodon.art had cut off.
So I couldn't migrate my followers, or even boost old posts from the to-be-retired account, or tag my old account.
Hugely annoying. Love decentralization, but this needs to be figured out in some form or fashion.
David Fleetwood - RG Admin@izjustpixels @anildash She's a real piece of work, a white woman who went colonial to South Africa, and aggressively tone polices the oppressed.
Her instance is a massive problem due to how she runs it, lots of people join due to the name without realizing she's blocked a huge chunk of the fediverse.
@reflex @anildash Yup. When I signed up on that instance it was because I'd seen a bunch of great artists on there, and it seemed like the instance was quite active.
The rest of it I learned about later... and then triggered the account migration. Which ended up not really being a "migration" as much as a "fresh start", due to the aforementioned issues. 😖
@izjustpixels @anildash It's very unfortunate and that instance has led to a lot of the bad taste former fedi members have, imo.
Courtney
SpaceLifeFormI smell m.s in the glorb with a flux capacitor.
Bird
👩🦯The Blind Fraggle@anildash Yeah, I get that keeping people safe is important, but I still don't think it's great in most cases.
Ω 🌍 Gus Posey@anildash It's like watching part of your spaceship decompress.
Steve's Place@anildash The mods of the instance can make exceptions. It's not a good system.
Dr Neenah Estrella-Luna@anildash Sounds kind of like how nation states have operated for a couple of centuries.
Mx. Luna Corbden 🐸@anildash @blogdiva The solve for this is supposed to be account portability between instances, but without a way to move your posts, boosts, faves, etc., well, portability isn't real. It's a gaping hole that would solve many of the in failures in the utopia we were sold.
I'd imagine that for many reasons, this isn't an easy feature to create. Security issues alone seem insurmountable. But it's sorely needed to prevent top-down abuses of power, and just generally, users being at the mercy of a single instance admin.
Paul Fuxjaeger@anildash this is why I'm not a big fan of defederation. I think blocks should be determined at a user level.
aburka 🫣@anildash I mean, of course there's a fix: one or both of them switch instances.
You're going to say that not a fix because it's impractical, annoying, post history doesn't transfer, etc. All true but it is the fix offered by this platform. And one that doesn't exist at all on centralized platforms where a ban is the the of the line.
Furthermore it bothers me a little bit that you're saying a "beef" is the only possible reason for the defederation. Certainly there are dumb dramas causing defederations. But there are also many that happen for deeply legitimate reasons.
For those reasons this seems like ragebait.
Andrew Melder@anildash it's been a while, but wasn't there something in development that would allow an individual to follow other individuals directly regardless of instance-wide moderation settings?
Agreed though that this has always been a shit way to do things.
Glyph@anildash One of the most annoying ideas in the fediverse is the idea that we should abstract over the idea of an "instance" or automatically roulette people into different tiny instances to avoid making Mastodon gGmbH too powerful and because "instance choice" is a scary and irrelevant technical detail. The instance you're signing up for is the *service* you're signing up for. When people talk about email, they intuitively understand. You sign up for GMail, you don't sign up for "SMTP".
@anildash Similarly, Mastodon's biggest flaw is allowing a zillion "mastodon dot whatever" instances to spring up run by randos, rather than enforcing their trademark.
But the Fediverse will not actually succeed at large until there are a double-digit number of recognizable "brands" to sign up for, which have some distinctive features and branding and not just an amorphous blob of "wait, is this Mastodon?"
JonOne of several biggest flaws related to this! Also:
The combination of trying to shield people from the up-front choice and lack of a migration path
The difficulty of finding resources for people trying to choose an instance.
The failure to invest in moderation and safety, meaning that instance blocking (an incredibly blunt tool, but one that actually exists and works) is very overused.
The lack of any process and tooling around defederation when it does make sense. Best practices are to notify people on both instances so folks aren't taken by surprise (ideally in advance to give time for contingency planning)... I'm. not sure how often that happens, and even when it does, how does an admin effectively notify people?
It's a mess.
"One of the most annoying ideas in the fediverse is the idea that we should abstract over the idea of an "instance" "
Agreed!
Jeremy@jdp23 @glyph @anildash
The instance I'm on blocks most of the "mastodon" instances along with a list of others. Makes viewing threads impossible - I'm constantly hitting the "view in browser" button. (And I'm far too lazy to spin up my own instance - tried once, hit a block and gave up 🙄). I know there's lots of instances that block the "big" ones, decrying their lack of moderation.
The instance I'm on blocks most of the "mastodon" instances along with a list of others. Makes viewing threads impossible - I'm constantly hitting the "view in browser" button. (And I'm far too lazy to spin up my own instance - tried once, hit a block and gave up 🙄). I know there's lots of instances that block the "big" ones, decrying their lack of moderation.
@glyph @jdp23 @anildash
To make a short answer long: I created an account on mastodon.social in 2018, didn't really do anything w it. When twitter imploded, I got back on it, but found some compelling discussions about being on a smaller, local instance. Some folx I follow joined triangletoot.party and I jumped over also (via the broken migration 😞). I do occasionally browse the local feed and it's generally relevant. But the isolation from that list of other instances does suck.
To make a short answer long: I created an account on mastodon.social in 2018, didn't really do anything w it. When twitter imploded, I got back on it, but found some compelling discussions about being on a smaller, local instance. Some folx I follow joined triangletoot.party and I jumped over also (via the broken migration 😞). I do occasionally browse the local feed and it's generally relevant. But the isolation from that list of other instances does suck.
@jeromio @jdp23 @anildash I'm glad that the deal has at least been partially worth it for you. Personally I've been pretty angry to see fedi activists doing drive-by shaming of people on .social, telling them (especially people who don't really understand the tradeoff) tht they need to migrate to somewhere smaller; one of the reasons I'm on here is that I am stubbornly *not* taking the advice that it's somehow immoral to support a big instance
Paco Hope@glyph It’s interesting to see this conversation in my timeline just 5 posts away from this:
@paco @anildash I think that distribution actually looks relatively healthy as far as what it's sampling. notice that "other" remains larger than many large players; none of these people are entering work email addresses in this context; gmail is at 75% not 99%; lots of *applications* (dnalounge itself, for example) can easily use non-gmail for interfacing with consumers who largely use gmail.
@glyph I don’t know if you have run your own email server. I’ve been self-hosting mine since 1999. We’d like to think that SMTP is this neutral Internet standard and everybody obeys it, even Google. That’s not the case. If 75% of people use one service, and you want to interact with those people, you run your mail server how Google wants you to, whether that’s how the RFC says or not.
There are parts of the standard that are optional (DKIM, DMARC, etc). Google says “unless you do DKIM, your mail goes to our users’ spam folders.” DKIM is no longer optional if you want GMail users to get your email. GMail’s deliverability rules are the Internet’s deliverability rules.
The same could happen to ActivityPub or any other protocol. 75% is well more than what it takes to dominate. 25% of us can email each other following the RFCs. But if we want to email the other 75%, we do what Google says.
Martin Kirchgessner
Hynek Schlawack@martin_kirch @anildash as someone working for a small web host: let me tell you all the ways i know
this is why i always fought back against the starry-eyed about federation being as great as email. i mean it’s true in A way, but most people don’t appreciate it.
@martin_kirch @hynek in theory, maybe. In the real world? Not at all. It's not something that affects normal users, whereas this is something I see about once a year in the fediverse. We need to fix it.
Erik Play2Learn@anildash There's a fix: one of them moves to another instance. Moving without loss of data is a feature here.
They can also host their own instance.
@fallbackerik this is no kind of fix at all, in reality.
Pandora
Juan Nunez-IglesiasJuan Nunez-Iglesias (@[email protected])
Defederation must be the single worst feature of mastodon. Currently a bunch of instances are defederating/threatening to defederate with fosstodon (👋) because a mod is a right-wing troll, and the instance owners are standing by said troll. I totally agree with that assessment, and it sucks, but the defederation logic is similar to an ISP saying the US is run by fascist goons (true), therefore we are going to block all US IPs (sorry, what?!). CC @[email protected]