There are a large number of unanswered questions about the Fediverse. I don’t just mean questions that users may have, but questions for which no suitable answer exists yet. Some are extremely abstract and existential like “will the Fediverse survive the next decade?” Other questions are very concrete like, “What is the copyright status of a federated post?” or “What are the moral implications of federating content that may be harmful or recording a crime?”

I wonder, for those of you who stay up nights thinking about the Fediverse, which question is the most important to you?

  • Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    28·
    1 month ago

    Scalability. Federation adds overhead that increases as the number of instances increases. It is unclear to me when we will hit a wall but it’s probably not far off.

    How will we pay the bills. Some instances get enough donations to pay server costs but none get enough to pay for staff or developers.

    Both of those are only really problems if the fediverse grows, which it hasn’t for a while now. But that could change at any moment.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    19·
    1 month ago

    Is it part of the same dynamics as mainstream social media? Meaning, can we make it substancially better than Twitter, Reddit & Co or do we always have some baseline negativity and not so great group dynamics?

    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
      12·
      1 month ago

      I’d wager that enshittification is inevitable, but the Fediverse can “live on” between cycles because instances or even entire systems can go down while new Fediverse ones take their place.

      • AndrewZabar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 month ago

        Plus, fediverse clusters can break apart like tectonic plates and become continents if any serious barriers need to happen. It might happen over time if any instances start to specialize. Never know.

        • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
          3·
          1 month ago

          I’d be a shame if it really broke apart. I mean that would be more a De-Fediverse. Like all the Discourse forums where I need to open up every single one of them to read what’s new, because they’re specialized and not interconnected in practice. I’d advocate for the instances to still interconnect while doing whatever they want. And giving more control to the individual user. Ultimately… it’s complicated. We have things like (instance) local timelines in some federated software. And it’d be great to have distinct Lemmy places/instances. One for political debate and news, one dedicated to Free Software… That’s kind of what communities are for. But it’s the same people in all larger ones. And the instances all look the same, and topics and interests are not part of the onboarding process. So people currently end up on some random instance.

          • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
            2·
            1 month ago

            What’s to stop people from making “tunnel” instances, maybe even with reposts?

            That aside, ultimately, we’re at the mercy of whoever is paying for the instance, and their interests. So if everything does fragment, it’s just kinda the nature of the hosts.

            • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
              1·
              1 month ago

              Sure. The nice thing is, it’s all Free Software. I pay like 6€ a month for my own small server. I’m at my own mercy.

            • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
              2·
              1 month ago

              I should do that. I got rid of my newsreader like 10 years ago when I noticed I was doomscrolling through the news every morning and afternoon. And it consumed too much of my energy. Maybe I should start fresh with a small and curated smaller list. I kind of forgot about RSS aside from podcasts… So thanks for the advice.

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
      41·
      1 month ago

      Conflating Xitter with the R-site seems a bit harsh. One is a bubbling morass of incivility and lying, an infernal radicalization machine, the world’s virtual toilet wall. The other is a generally successful community whose control structure is excessively private and centralized. That’s the way I see it, anyway.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        3·
        1 month ago

        Sure. X is a toxic mess. And has been for quite some time. Whereas I kinda liked the community on Reddit. Quite some nice people there and good conversations. Unfortunately the company behind it likes to F their moderators and users. Kicked them out for speaking up, made the platform worse and Apps don’t work anymore. And they put in a decent amount of effort to specifically F us over, so I left. But I get what you say. That’s not the community’s fault.

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
    9·
    1 month ago

    If the current leading theory of dark matter being a fundamental particle means that there were “two big bangs” why would the dark big bang have to appear second?

  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
    6·
    1 month ago

    A big one is “How does an instance change their underlying implementation?”. Like how could a lemmy instance decide to migrate to become a Mastodon instance?

    Currently that’s just not possible, but it seems important for the long term survival of an instance. It seems naive to think that an instance will stay the same implementation forever. But ActivityPub basically makes this impossible.

    • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 month ago

      it’s useful to be able to change implementation, but I’m not sure if changing also the platform type is a good idea. that’s a different instance then, with the former one being shut down. mastodon and lemmy are quite different.

      lemmy has multiple implementations already. when switching between them only the database and the structure of the attachment storage should need to be converted, and ideally that should be done by the implementation you are switching to.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
        2·
        1 month ago

        lemmy has multiple implementations already

        No it doesn’t? There is only one Lemmy implementation. There are some similar alternatives like PieFed and Mbin but those are separate implementations and are not in any way related to Lemmy, aside from using the same ActivityPub extensions.

        There is really no such thing as a “platform type” - it’s all ActvityPub under the hood.

        • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          1 month ago

          No it doesn’t? There is only one Lemmy implementation

          Beehaw is not very happy with the Lemmy project, and was looking for alternative implementations a few months ago. I remember to have read that they have found something written in Java, and maybe another one, that was basically a separate implementation of Lemmy.

          There is really no such thing as a “platform type” - it’s all ActvityPub under the hood.

          Try to view a Peertube stream on Lemmy, then. Or subscribe to a Mastodon user. There are platform types, and there will be at least until the platform has to implement its own way to interpret and render the content of an other platform that hosts content of a different kind. Even when a platform type implements full AP compatibility, there will often be things a specific platform won’t be able to display.

          • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
            1·
            1 month ago

            I remember to have read that they have found something written in Java

            You’re talking about Sublinks and it has yet to reach a usable state. It doesn’t seem like development is going particularly fast.

  • Pyflixia@kbin.melroy.org
    5·
    1 month ago

    Will it last?

    That’s always been my concern. I’ve seen a lot of great alternatives come up over the years, some last a few years, but some also have lasted a couple months. I think the Fediverse as a concept and as an idea will last a lot longer than anything that branches off from it. So even if Lemmy dies or KBin goes or something else. There will always be a Fediverse and something will come off from it that will continue.

    • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
      8·
      1 month ago

      ATProto is what Bluesky uses, right? It’d be nice if someone could give a quick summary of the features and what differentiates it compared to ActivityPub.

      It seems like it would be a pretty big task to switch from ActivityPub, because each fediverse project would have to implement that independently.

      • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
        6·
        1 month ago

        There are a number of features that make them different, but the major one that makes me favour ATProto is that it gets around the centralization problems of the Fediverse.

        I’m @savvywolf@pawb.social on ActivityPub, this means:

        • My identity is linked to pawb.social. That means that if someone falls out with my admin over something, I get blocked as fallout.
        • Likewise, if my admin falls out with someone else and blocks them, I have to follow those decisions.
        • My data is stored on pawb.social. That means that if the server gets shut down, even with warning, poof! My data is gone.

        In addition, there isn’t any way to transfer data between ActivityPub instances. Sure you can set up redirects in Mastodon, but there’s no way to actually transfer information or history.

        There’s really no reason these three things all need to be managed by the same entity (pawb.social in my case).

        Under ATProto:

        • My identity is handled by DNS. I control my domain name, so I control my identity and reputation.
        • While this isn’t battle tested yet, ATProto (or at least Bluesky) has much better support for blocklists. Individual users can create their own blocklist and share them with others. So Bluesky itself doesn’t need to ban other instances unless they start doing really illegal things.
        • My data is stored on Bluesky’s servers, but I can easily move it to another server if I need to without breaking anything (I think? ATProto nerds, is this true?).

        If I don’t like the way Bluesky is going I can just… Leave. I can move my data to another platform and log in to another frontend. All without my followers even noticing a difference or losing any content.

        It also has some cool features. For example, there’s this thing which allows you to just set up pronouns so that they are visible on your own profile to other people that use the list. https://bsky.app/profile/pronouns.adorable.mom All implemented without any protocol extensions.

        • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
          2·
          1 month ago

          Dumb backend, smart frontend?

          Basically, have hosts replace services like AWS but don’t make them have any power (except for choosing if they agree to host NSFW content or not) and make the data they host public so anyone can develop a frontend to access it, a single account giving you access to everything, administer your own experience, mods have control over the communities they moderate but there’s no admin that can decide you don’t have access to a big chunk of the content because they don’t want to be federated with certain instances.

      • SavvyWolf@pawb.socialEnglish
        3·
        1 month ago

        I don’t think so - there’s already a project that bridges between AT and AP, so in theory it’s possible for that to just be pulled into Mastodon proper.

        However, that’s not to say it’ll be easy. It’ll be a years of work with lots of challenges and drama.

  • kerrigan778@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 month ago

    If it’s so decentralized, where are all the local communities? I know, I know, it needs to get bigger, but still. The lack of niche and local communities and even localized instances is a major weakness.

  • abff08f4813c@j4vcdedmiokf56h3ho4t62mlku.srv.usEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    Getting to nomadic identity, and the equivalent for magazines/communities (i.e. being able to change what instance your account is based off of, as well as the instance that hosts a given community).