okawari

This doesn’t seem entirely accurate to me.

Most public platforms interacting with the Fediverse today does require you to register an email address out of practical considerations but this is not a requirement of the system in itself. It is possible to both post and read an unmoderated fediverse with enough effort.

If you don’t like the moderation of your particular server, you are fully able to create your own or set up an existing solution yourself that gives you 100% control over what kind of content you post, and in turn which content you federate to your server. Of course, you can’t control which servers decide to allow your content on their server, but any user of servers where your content is blocked can do the same and have access to your content again.

As far as privacy goes, you can rent servers and purchase domains with crypto currencies which are not traceable back to you where you can host your own service that interacts with the fediverse, making you 100% able to control the information you post into it.

A federated system is in a decentralized system too, but I reckon you’re asking about the difference between something that is decentralized in the way Bitcoin or similar systems are, versus the federated software of the Fediverse.

This might be an oversimplification, but the main difference comes mostly down to a philosophy on state and statemanagement.
A decentralized system in the style of Bitcoin and such are a single source of truth decided by consensus of many independent actors(servers) where none of them have any more influence than the other.
However it is important that all actors agree on the entire state of the system, you can’t have an actor that only cares about transcations of exactly 420$ for example.
If some servers have a different view which transactions are true; this is a problem for bitcoin as the system requires a single consensus of whats real to work. (I’m no BC expert, but this should be true on a high level, even if there are practical solutions to this)

On the other hand, a federated systems like on Mastodon are a bunch of independent servers which have their own state(ie posts and what not). They are the ultimate owner of said content, in the sense that that they don’t need approval of any other member in the fediverse to post that content. The decentralized part of the fediverse is obviously the fact that fediverse servers shares its posts with all other servers it knows off, but its not expected behavior that all servers in the fediverse has to have all posts, and the system is not degraded should some posts be missing.

Sadly, I’m sure any social platform where one can make their own private community (actually private or perceived to be private) will have more of these than most of us think. Its just that we don’t see them.

I’m also not surprised that services like discord is seemingly relaxed at moderating them, as its a problem that is invisible to most users. Moderating is expensive, and unless it hurts public opinion, seemingly its not worth it for them

For sure. Though, the sensors will pick up when the first of two seals break, you could potentially use the system while a replacement seal is being worked on. If you’re feeling adventurous that is. ;)

I figure if you buy that house in that location, the cost of having it fixed isnt even on your radar.

I think this is the web bubble bursting again. Venture Capitalists have piled money on a bunch of sites and products, we’ve become used to good free services.

The economy has taken a down turn and there is a increased demand for instant profitability and more and more social media companies realize they have overestimated how many people are willing to become paying customers. So they are forced to cut the product in order to save money instead.

I have a big enough house to be able to put this machine somewhere out of the way but there are plenty of cheap server gear on classifieds. I paid ish 300 euros for a 32 core machine with 40gb ram. I can host all the things without it even breaking a sweat.

Probably uses a lot more electricity, but I haven’t really noticed it on my power bill

I too love the idea of the “small web”, I’ve pined for it these last few years as I look back on the web of my childhood where there were many interesting and quirky sites compared to now where everything feels consolidated and interest for non-techies or semi-techies to have their own website is all but gone it seems.

I’dd like to share a website I came across a while back. I can’t remember the URL cause sadly I didn’t store it.

The site was a personal website of a photographer. It has a very unorthodox design and consisted of a bunch of repeating sections, each for a topic or category of content.

Each of these sections were a list of cards, scrollable in the horizontal direction. Each section has individual scrolling. The cards were either links to articles or high-res images.

The page loaded atrociously slow, and a quick look at the inspector showed why, we loaded about 300MB of images, quite the amount of code and it was clear that the entire site was made by a novice programmer, which made me immediately load all of the images that I could ever scroll into view. Quite the opposite of lean website technically, but definitely a small web website in essence and presentation. I think “small web” websites are small in scope and very personal. But whether or not they are small in size or features is less of a concern to me, I got spare cycles to burn anyways.

I think the web has for a long time lacked identity and personal connection, I hope that the renewed interest in federation and the small web will let more people express themselves more freely.

I host a bunch of websites for normal small businesses many of them have contact forms and all of them have captcha.
We’ve seen a steady rise in spam that gets through it over the last year or so. I don’t have any concrete numbers at hand, but we’ve heard from customers that they used to get a few spam replies once in a while before but get 10-20 a day over prolonged periods of time now.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re aproaching a point where computers are better at solving captchas than human.

Noticed that as well, guess twitter will become much less linked to in the future?

I checked out how much it would cost to for example make live streaming platform using AWS on the backend. This is an example they give on their cost/pricing page:

Approximately 10,000 viewers for a one-hour live event using a high definition (HD)-1080p encoding profile is approximately $12.50 for live encoding and packaging + $1531.49 for 18,017GB distribution = $1,543.99 for the one-hour event.

AWS is known to be VERY expensive, you can probably save quite a bit with a smaller setup, but I don’t think a longer 5+ hour stream would be cheap if done outside of these platforms.

I’dd love to hear if anyone has any real life experience with hosting large live streams like this on the cheap.

If you check the sidebar of a magazine, you will see a link to a log of all moderator actions such as deletions and what not.

I’m genuinely not sure, but since ernest shows up as mod on all external magazines, I wouldn’t be surprised if it blocked everything.

In fact, If you go to https://kbin.social/d/kbin.social today, you do see the external posts.

Agreed. I found the process of buying a domain and a webhost to be both cheap and quite painless. Once logged in I would even be able to make email addresses and do one click installations of lots of common software such as wordpress.

I’dd say that if you just want to get your stuff out on the web without being under the umbrella of a larger corporation, the bar is quite low if you know where to look.

I would much more like to see this bloom into something that mixes with the fediverse. Some kind of easy to use tool that would allow you to create your websites, but also broadcast your changes and your content. Kind of like a webring on steroids

I think their edge is that they are privacy focused, you can take control of your own data and use non commercial services, like theirs to host your website. Maybe I’m misrepresenting them here, but thats what I got out of it.

In general, I’m receptive to a new creative space where people can make small fun sites and experiences again like before on the old web. But privacy was not the reason it went out of fashion, so I don’t think their pitch for what is essentially a way to host websites.

I’m sure it would be possible to self host a kitten site, but unless the code for their infrastructure is open sourced as well as their public tooling then there is both a hosting dependence, and vendor lock in, which is kind of the opposite of freeing your data.

Hopefully, I’m just misreading the project entirely, I don’t really want to hate on someone’s effort.

I only skimmed the video, but kinda paused when they ran a deployment function on a git repository, suggesting they are still just an external hosting provider.

This struck me as a traditional web host with a built in javascript framework.

I think you are right for the most part. I assume that some big servers will take most of the users and that the cost of maintaining the fediverse will become quite high in one way or the other as the network grows and the malicious actors gain incentives to interact with the network.

I think the fediverse is more like the old web. I don’t really consider my data very portable, but my ways of consuming and interacting with the content is. I for one don’t really care if my posts go with me if i move somewhere else. If my home server defederates, then I can move to another kbin instance and my experience remains much the same. The monolithic singular identity that I can take with me wherever I go isn’t something the fediverse delivers on right now, but that is fine.

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.

Honestly, I’ve been off reddit for a long time. Reddit made casual lurking so hard I stopped bothering.

That being said, the fediverse has probably been the first time in some time where I’ve had fun on the internet. It has somewhat recaptured the old spirit of finding new interesting things and communities online, even if most of them are just lemmy instances, and the same kind of content that was on reddit.

I think the reason for the high result count is because it allows results with both fuck and spez,

"fuck spez" OR "fuck u/spez" site:reddit.com

gives around 103,000 results which is probably more accurate, but sadly less hilarious.