Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
Please check my post, I think everything I said is very valid, but I want this community to see it too, and help steer the discussion, I think reddit is doing this intentionally.
To challenge some of your replies, if those are welcome.
People do actually complain about email, quite often. Spam filters and deliverability are real challenges sometimes. Email also has a lot of gotchas that you can run into - like what happens when you lose control of a domain name? What happens if your email provider shuts down? Who actually owns the email - you or the provider? A lot of email protocol has inherent security and privacy issues too. I don’t know if I’d use email as the leading example. Phone networks or text messages might be a little more straightforward.
I also don’t think it’s entirely true that federation is strictly necessary. Wikimedia seems to run a lot of centralized services with large scale and large community with no federation. Tildes is a valid alternative to both Lemmy instances and Reddit with no federation. If Tildes for example went in a bad direction or became corrupted - it is open source. You could just start a new Tildes using the same source code. It isn’t federated, but does it have to be?
Very few of these things are something that normal everyday email users have to deal with with any regularity, I work in IT and while the windows outlook client does have a lot of issues, no such problems exist if you use gmail, or any of the common email providers, really.
Yes, it absolutely does have to be, because federation means that the community isn’t tied to any particular instance. Wikipedia is great right now, but what if somebody else takes over wikipedia, then we’re simply screwed, they have complete control over the platform, we can’t just stop using wikipedia and get the same content elsewhere, because that’s simply not possible without federation. Especially on profit-driven websites, this is an impossible issue to solve without federation.
Yes, we could start a new tildes… but without ANY OF THE CONTENT, nobody would switch unless there was a massive reason to, it would take a massive feat of community organization to switch.
Whereas on a federated system, if you switched to another instance, you’d lose literally nothing.
These problems do exist for normal people. If you violate Google terms of service across any Google service for example you will lose access to your @gmail.com account with no recourse. Email services that aren’t run by a megacorp shutdown all the time. In this list of Gmail alternatives posted on Mashable from 2007 over 50% are no longer in business.
With email most people have three options:
This requires more technical knowledge than the average person has and comes with risks and deliverability issues.
You could use service like ProtonMail or Fastmail - but these companies are far more likely to go out of business compared to something like Apple or Google.
This comes with privacy and control concerns. If you aren’t paying for Gmail - you are being monetized in some other way.
From a privacy perspective this sounds like a feature to me, not a bug. I don’t necessarily want my content to live in perpetuity. I regularly delete my Reddit comments and posts after a few weeks. I delete my all my social media accounts entirely every two years. Tildes going down and being replaced with a new instance and fresh content is not a problem for me.
Different values I guess.
Yet nearly everyone has an email, and nobody is suggesting we centralize it, because that would be a significantly worse experience for everyone. All of the issues you complain about would also exist in a centralized instance, especially the “use a megacorporation” one, are you suggesting reddit isn’t a megacorporation? If megacorps still work as options on federated instances, then that still means federation is a net positive, EVEN IF they’re the only ones that can make it work reliably, it’s still better that they’re all stuck competing. You’ll notice, gmail doesn’t suck.
Why on earth do you expect your data to be private on a public forum?
Do you not know about archive.org?
Even on reddit, they EXIST to sell your data, privacy is completely nonexistent on public forums, and it never will be, you’re essentially asking users to trust in a benevolent dictatorship on their data.
If that’s something you truly care about, you should be self-hosting, not pretending that what you’re doing is somehow secure because you delete your data, do you honestly think reddit deletes your data? How do you know tildes does? You have no idea, because you couldn’t control it even if you wanted to.
People are actively migrating to centralized communication platforms away from email. Pretty much every messaging application or chat service with mass adoption at the moment is centralized.
I am not suggesting anything, just saying that I don’t know if email is a great example of federation without issues. I think it’s important to be transparent about the downsides of federation as part of the discussion.
There is a difference between expecting something to be private on the internet, and the application you are using respecting your privacy. Archive.org is not run by Lemmy - it is a third party outside of our ability to control. Lemmy can control how it handles deleted and edited content within it’s system. I don’t like how Lemmy handles deleted content for example. I think a delete should be a delete - it should be gone, or anonymized within Lemmy specifically.
I have not made that argument. There is also nothing, as far as I can see, that would prevent the owner of a Lemmy instance (or a fork of the Lemmy software) from doing anything you list here. The software license allows for commercial use and doesn’t seem to include any mandates for how instance maintainers interact with user data.