Thinking deeply about lemmy I came up with a deep thought which is the following:
Federation for Pixelfed, Mastodon, Pleroma and Peertube solve one main issue which is the lack of freedom of speech.
In the case of lemmy, federation create problems, increases latency, increases the chances of abuse in every form possible and decrease the freedom of speech.
For demonstration purposes, here are the typical use cases in every platform :
Reddit: a user signs up for the site, he got banned from one Subreddit, thus he cannot access it or interact with it.
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The only choice he has is to create a new Subreddit if he is willing to do that, or join an already created Subreddit.
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If he got banned from the whole site by Reddit admins, he cannot do anything about it.
Saidit: a user signs up for the site, he got banned from one sub, thus he cannot access it or interact with it.
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The only choice he has is to create a new sub if he is willing to do that, or join an already created sub.
If he got banned from the whole site by saidit admins, he could host the saidit code on his server.
Lemmy: a user needs to find the right server in order to get accepted in (each server with their own rules and problems) after he finally created an account, he got banned from sub, thus he cannot access it or interact with it.
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The only choice he has is to create a new sub if he is willing to do that, or join an already created sub.
If he got banned from the whole site by his lemmy admins, he could host his lemmy instance or search, find and get accepted into a new server.
Noticed something? There is almost nothing new in the case of lemmy compared to saidit.
Matter of fact, it’s easier to get banned in lemmy than saidit.
If I got banned for this post, federation in lemmy will not change anything for me
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.
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Federation – more generally, a decentralized platform – serves as a compromise between two extremes for platform design:
This compromise allows federated platforms to more closely align with the underlying social graphs/structures they are built to serve. There are multiple levels of control and moderation that grant some power to individual users, and some to the providers, to tune their collective social graphs as desired. I appreciate this balance of power.
As an example, lemmygrad defederated from wolfballs entirely. I don’t want to be associated with wolfballs myself (1st degree). I could have made a point of blocking individual users myself, or even the entire instance myself. But more to the point, I don’t want to be associated with anyone that associates with wolfballs (2nd degree). I want providers to have the power to say “no, that’s absolutely unacceptable; if you want to associate with those people, you’ll have to do it yourself; we aren’t helping you.”
On the other hand, I may not find the liberal sensibilities of many lemmy.ml users appealing, but I don’t think the community is an irredeemable toxic dumpheap either.
There were three equally important points made in your quote, of which, censorship resistance was only one. And not the typical kind of “muh freeze peach” so-called “censorship” either.
I don’t think that history supports your claim that open source nodes and federated nodes either enjoy the same benefits or suffer the same drawbacks. Specifically, the source code isn’t the point of a platform. Its social graph is the point. Open source clones of centralized platforms like reddit don’t have access to the social graph of the actual reddit. Federated nodes do, up to a point. And that is their main selling point that differentiates them from the latest “I’ll make my own reddit, with blackjack and hookers” clones.
If I got banned from nrsk.no, What choices do I have???
In very simple terms, why lemmy?
Other way to put it :
Lemmy vs the other platforms.
In my opinion, lemmy does not have any advantage compared to the other platforms.
Lemmy right now is a collection of the already existing ideas in social media combined with federation, which does not give lemmy any benefit in the practical terms.
(above emphasis is mine)
What this tells me is that you’ve probably never had to deal with the practical problems of other platforms that federation provides (some) degree of solution to. Which is fine. So long as federation isn’t solving a problem for you, then there isn’t much of a reason to either adopt or reject it. It’s just this thing that others are excited about. But I promise, not experiencing a problem doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist for others.
Can you tell me exactly, in simple terms, what is that problem that I am not experiencing?
It’s like people in the comments are speaking about a mythical creature that I had never seen before, it’s pretty easy to say it like" this solution is for this problem" as simple as that, I do not have to experience it or even know about it.
The main reasons I am asking this here:
With all due respect to the users and the developers, in my eyes this is not a complex machine working, instead this is as I said before old ideas glued with federation.
Overall I started to feel that there is no use to support this project, and I am even thinking about deleting my account here soon, to search for alternative projects or even use and support existing ones(phuks, saidit, raddle, etc…).
I appreciate the time you spent writing your comments, thank you.
I truthfully don’t know how to make it any simpler than what I and others have already said.
If you cannot put it in words then at least show me by pictures, demonstrate using examples or tell me about a personal experience by you or any person you know in real life or social media, what I am asking you: is to guide me through what I truthfully cannot make sense of.
I had never seen any comment here telling me about how the federation in lemmy is going to solve any issue that the other websites could not solve.
If you are that worried about getting banned and trying find the right server to join that would have same views as you, you might as well as think about self hosting which is expensive to run monthly but at least you feel like you’re in control I guess… 🤷♂️
I am not worried about getting banned, I am asking why should I join lemmy instead of Reddit, saidit or poal.
I completely disagree. In fact, ‘freedom of speech’ is not why I use Lemmy instances as opposed to other sites. I haven’t been banned from any reddit-like site. It’s also not why I use PeerTube. And based on what I’ve seen, 'free speech ’ isn’t the main reason why people use Pixelfed/Mastodon/Pleroma. Most of the millions moving to Mastodon aren’t doing it because they or their friends were banned or censored. The following points apply just as much to those platforms as they do Lemmy:
Even your implicit argument of different rules/moderation isn’t the main reason I use Lemmy’s federation. Federation allows small communities with different communities, different moderation and different softwares to cross-pollinate. This is extremely useful for social media platforms where popularity is (let’s generalize) necessary, and we don’t have the first mover advantage like reddit.
In small communities this helps them stay alive. I’ve been on sites that have died. It’s not fun! That’s one thing federation solves for me.
Having been a moderator for many highly-liberal (as in liberty, like ‘freedom of speech’) communities, you’ll understand what I mean when I say not all speech is worth reading, even if there is value in letting people be allowed to say it. So, you are right in that federation has an appeal for ‘freeze peach’ idealists. Wolfballs exists and federates, despite their users being banned from the most popular instances. Lemmygrad didn’t want to listen to the neo-nazis who were taking advantage of Wolfballs’s freedoms. So due to federation, Wolfballs still have a platform and community, and Lemmygrad don’t have to waste their time scrolling through it, while both communities have access to other less-political federated instances. That’s a real scenario that happened. Not some idealistic what-if.
So just to make sure I understand you correctly, you are saying that people with different ideologies cannot join a single website? Let me break your arguments down one by one, so you will understand how none of the features you mentioned exist solely on federated websites.
To quote mastodon on “Why does decentralization matter?”:
So yes, the main advantage is censorship resistance.
Returning to your post, you are talking about the reasons for federation:
Progressive liberals, classical liberals, leninists can use one website peacefully without federation, three of them could sign up to any of the alternatives and use them immediately.
Federation work against small communities, as you are cutting a part of the service users and separating them.
If the software is open source, that advantage is hold regardless of the federation status, thus applying to any alternative open source project (For example saidit).
Matter of fact, you don’t have to look in theory to understand this, just look at the history. What happened after Reddit changed their code license? A lot of websites got started based on their code to replace them (phucks, poal, saidit, etc…).
Finally, to quote your last paragraph:
If lemmygrad got defederated from lemmy.ml what difference does federation does to change that??? None, they still cannot participate in asklemmy for example, thus they almost created a new lemmy website with new rules, the same thing that could happen with any open source project, technically they just hosted lemmy & would not benefit from federation at all because they are still banned, and they will be building their community from zero.
why do you “freeze peach” folks always harp on about “freeze peach” violations that are completely detached from reality?
what is your hypothetical user posting that is getting them banned? where are they posting it? you just sound like you want to disable the ban button.
I really did not get what is the point you are trying to make.
What is your argument here? What is your answer to the main question?
Does it matter?
None of the alternatives listed survive without a ban button in their software futures, so again, what is your answer/argument?
where did you get this from?
To quote mastodon on “Why does decentralization matter?”:
So, yes:
don’t see freedom of speech there
It cannot be more straight forward than this.
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Dear human,
Do yourself and the lemmy community a favor and stop being negative for the sake of being negative.
Most of your profile history is deleted by you, your negativity is overflowing, preventing even you from expressing your thoughts.
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