Mastondon does allow you to export your profiles and set them up on a different instance; I reckon some folks will figure out a solution on how to easily jump ship.

I’ve been online for close to 30 years now.

I’ve lost count of the number of forums I’ve had to leave because they went to shit.

I always find another one.

That’s why we need to decentralize. If there’s 100 communities over 50 servers, then it doesn’t matter which website goes down or defederates. It’s only if everyone stays on one or two instances that the fediverse breaks.

Over on mastodon, big instances have gone down, people notice but it isnt the end of the world.

@Guy_Fieris_Hair I doubt that lemmy.ml or lemmy as a whole would sell-out to Facebook as they are Tankies.

I feel there will at some point be a “this is why we can’t have nice things” moment with ActivityPub and Federation in general.

Karma is probably pretty easy to farm using fake home servers or botted accounts, and other kinds spam is probably going to be an issue if this platform reaches any level of mainstream popularity.

I think many parallels can be drawn between ActivityPub and E-mail, here. E-mail works, but not without a lot of gatekeeping, blocking and spam. Its really hard not to get blocked as a self hosted email server today, you are probably going to be mostly blocked by default until you build somewhat of a reputation for your server, etc. I foresee similar levels of maintenance being needed in the future in order to keep servers federated.

As far as moving your account, some things are easier than others to deal with. Things such as subscriptions and likes is probably a lot easier to move to a new account than entire post histories and such.

Popular pieces of software that’s part of the fediverse usually give you either:

1. Export options - manual export options intended for GDPR-Compliance and peace of mind
2. Account Move options - Mastodon is best known for this, as you can migrate your profile (but not your posts and followers) to another instance. Anyone which then visits your old page will have it blurred out, linking to your new one.

#2 could be expanded in the case of Kbin and Lemmy to also include subscribed communities/magazines, settings and some other things where Federation allows for it.

What would selling out to Meta look like?

I wonder if there could be a universal subscribed communities + followed users data format people could export before they move instances. Hard part would be getting everyone to use it

Maybe there’ll be a standard for threadiverse that each software like Lemmy and Kbin will eventually follow. A standard that lets us migrate from Lemmy to Kbin and others easily. Then, if at some point some software becomes GPL-licensed, we don’t have to be worried about software overtake like MS did with Minecraft.

Search indexing is also a huge problem. While it’s possible to create a search index over all content local to a given server, maintaining an index over all content on all servers that you federate is a much bigger issue. And that’s before we get to the problem of migrating associated content when a profile moves from one server to another.

It is really strange, in that it WORKS like the old Wild West of Web 2.0 when it was all blogs and RSS feeds but it doesn’t FEEL like the Wild West. It’s definitely civilization here.

agreed. It’s got bugs, and scalability issues, but i’m liking to “quirkiness” of it. I’ve most most of my stuff to the fediverse so far. It’ll need a lot more polishing to attract mainstream attention, but it’s nice to have this option.

Mastodon is a bit more polished than Lemmy/kbin, although is still missing some important features.

But the really important thing to remember is that the maintainers of Fediverse platforms will be continuing to make things better for users (overall), while Reddit/Twitter/Facebook will continue to make things worse for users (overall). In the long run, the Fediverse will be way better for users than the corporate platforms.

It’s the digital equivalent of off-grid living. I love how much useful tooling I can host myself on my little cluster, and it is empowering that $megacorp can’t hold it hostage or shove hostile tracking and advertising everywhere. The Fedeverse feels much closer to the spirit of the internet in its infancy.

I have my tweezers and table ready to go!

Defederate the truly hateful stuff

Realcaseyrollins was on this part of the fediverse for a long time, he routinely posts really decent stuff. He has a lot of posts on communities on narwhal.city that can be federated back here.

But can’t you control what instances you consume?

I think it depends on what you mean by privacy. But I do recommend you read what the Electronic Frontier Foundation has to say about the fediverse. They released an extensive series about it last year: Leaving Twitter’s Walled Garden & The Fediverse Could Be Awesome (If We Don’t Screw It Up).

Here’s the part that addresses your concern:

Take privacy: the default with incumbent platforms is usually an all-or-nothing bargain where you accept a platform’s terms or delete your account. The privacy dashboards buried deep in the platform’s settings are a way to tinker in the margins, but even if you untick every box, the big commercial services still harvest vast amounts of your data. To rely on these major platforms is to lose critical autonomy over your privacy, your security, and your free expression.

This handful of companies also share a single business model, based upon tracking us. Not only is this invasion of privacy creepy, but also the vast, frequently unnecessary amount and kinds of data being collected – your location, your friends and other contacts, your thoughts, and more – are often shared, leaked, and sold. They are also used to create inferences about you that can deeply impact your life.

Even if you don’t mind having your data harvested, the mere act of collecting all of this sensitive information in one place makes for a toxic asset. A single bad lapse in security can compromise the privacy and safety of hundreds of millions of people. And once gathered, the information can be shared or demanded by law enforcement. Law enforcement access is even more worrisome in post-Dobbs America, where we already see criminal prosecutions based in part upon people’s social media activities.

We’re also exhausted by social media’s often parasitic role in our lives. Many platforms are optimized to keep us scrolling and posting, and to prevent us from looking away. There’s precious little you can do to turn off these enticements and suggestions, despite the growing recognition that they can have a detrimental effect on our mental health and on our public discourse. Dis- and misinformation, harassment and bullying have thrived in this environment.

There’s also the impossible task of global content moderation at scale. Content moderation fails on two fronts: first, users all over the world have seen that platforms fail to remove extremely harmful content, including disinformation and incitement that is forbidden by the platforms’ own policies. At the same time, platforms improperly remove numerous forms of vital expression, especially from those with little social power. To add insult to injury, users are given few options for appeal or restoration.

These failures have triggered a mounting backlash. On both sides of the U.S. political spectrum, there’s been a flurry of ill-considered legislation aimed at regulating social media moderation practices. Outside of the U.S. we’ve seen multiple “online harms” proposals that are likely to make things worse for users, especially the most marginalized and vulnerable, and don’t meaningfully give everyday people more say over their online life. In some places, such as Turkey, bad legislation is already a reality.

When you post stuff on federated instances, it gets copied to the numerous servers that are federating with it. If you delete something, it’ll only get deleted on one server. The other servers might also delete it, but there’s a chance that some servers might still keep the deleted posts. So I’d just say be considerate and think twice before posting, because it can’t be deleted as easily.

https://joinfediverse.wiki/F.A.Q._-_Frequently_Asked_Questions#Deleted_posts

They’re not because you should assume that everything you say is public and can’t be deleted as a remote server may have a copy of what you said.

The key here is to not use identifiable information. Use a pseudonym.

You’ve almost got it. The thing is when you view content posted to another instance you’re not actually accessing the other instances, you’re viewing a copy of those posts stored on your instance. Federation works by distributing copies to all federated instances.

So if a big company like Google did as you said, and then suddenly defederated from everyone, you wouldn’t actually lose any of the content. All those posts up until the point of defederation would still be stored on every instance they were previously federated with. You would just stop getting new posts from that point forward.

There’s a bit of weirdness though, since the “true” post on the hosting instance is what handles syncing/distributing copies. So any new posts you made to those communities or comments on those posts couldn’t be copied back to the true post and then spread to the other instances. So everyone ends up with a desynced “ghost community”. So while you might see new posts/comments in those ghost communities from people on your instance, they don’t get synced to any other instance. (If you’re on an instance that beehaw.org recently defederated from, you can see that in action right now.)

So at the very least, the content would still be backed up, but you’re right in that people would need to “start over” and create new communities with new mods and new posts if they wanted the content to be federated. We just wouldn’t lose the old content.