I am completely in favour of supporting my local node with ad revenue. I feel it’s a necessary evil, and that the decentralization chills out the aggression with ads. I would be completely amenable to viewing 10% interleaved clearly-marked anonymous ads that are removed from the ‘print’ view. I’d accept if those ads were tuned to suit the interests of the sub.
I’m grateful for my home instance surviving and for me that’s an acceptable tradeoff.
Most ads are shit. Some ads will tell you about a new development - oura ring 6! Now without the slimeball subscription grift! - and some of those new features are actually beneficial.
And yeah, I get that we could disagree on this. I hope that de-fed, and a policy that ads are kept on the local node, will ensure there are nodes supported solely through donation with no ads, to serve its population how they prefer. I’d like that to be a differentiating feature and not “just find one without grade-school edgelordism” instead.
I don’t mind if my cable subscription has one or two ads, they need to cover all the fees for their TV licences
I don’t mind if YouTube has one or two ads, delivering videos over the internet is costly
Give an inch, and they’ll take a mile.
Adverts have been the bane of the internet experience since adverts arrived on the internet.
We must be like Edna from The Incredibles, learn from past mistakes, and take a hard stance against them.
No ads!
I’m worried that if we become dependent on ads, then we also become beholden to the advertisers. I don’t want to have to have to use neutered words like “unalive.” Give companies an inch, and they’ll take a mile. I’d rather avoid the risk of ads controlling my internet completely.
But it seems we’re on the same page about decentralization. There could be ad-sponsored instances for you and user-sponsored instances for me, and we can all get what we prefer. We all win when there are more choices available.
Tbh, the federated stuff also isn’t fully decentralized. It still has quite a few of the pitfalls of a centralized system, even if it’s setup on a distributed technology.
We are still relying on mostly one provider of software, there’s still one network, large instances still have a ton of power (e.g. if a few large instances defederate a small instance, it’s pretty much dead in the water).
If you want to really go decentralized, look back to the old stuff: dedicated bulletin boards and personal websites.
Tbh, the federated stuff also isn’t fully decentralized. It still has quite a few of the pitfalls of a centralized system, even if it’s setup on a distributed technology.
The wrong thing is distributed.
If an instance grows to some massive size (for whatever reason), it will just be the new Reddit, the new Twitter. If that instance gets purchased, the exact same issues await as on Reddit or Twitter.
It’s the back-end that should be decentralised while the front-end (all the user-generated content) should be uniformly distributed with backups across the entire fediverse. That way, if an instance goes down, the content and user accounts don’t go down with it.
So you are suggesting something akin to a classic distributed data storage system (e.g. something like a torrent) which is used as a backend for purely client-side frontends? Yeah, that could work.
Another option would be something akin to mailing lists. All the data is distributed among the clients and each client is responsible for backing up stuff they care about.
That would work decently for text-only messages, but with images and video, data and bandwith requirements would snowball like crazy.
It’s not exactly easy.
I think the easiest option would really be oldschool forums.
Yeah, the main problem is the storage required. A p2p kind of setup but with the back-end capable of RAID10-like redundancy, allowing for servers to keep varied amounts of data. With enough distributed servers/clients, no single instance could grow large enough to threaten the whole system.
As for oldschool forums - I think they’d just be a slight downgrade to something like Lemmy. You CAN operate Lemmy like a forum, you just get all the extra stuff on top.
Commenting for the algorithm /s
“No algorithms”??
What do you think “Hot” is? What do you think “active” is? There is some ranking algorithm that picks what to show. If you want to be pedantic, even “top” or “new” are algorithms.
Perhaps it would’ve been more accurate to say no mysterious, dark-pattern algorithms. The Fediverse has documented, simple algorithms that aren’t trying to manipulate the viewer.
I mean, that’s a little pedantic. Those are simple sorts by post attribute, not individualized preference targets. And you explicitly choose your own sort, it isn’t assigned secretly and dynamically.
It’s the difference between getting junk mail in your mailbox and going through the card catalogue at the library.
“hot” and “active” are not simple post attributes. It’s a weighted algorithm that takes into account many things like score, time, how fast the score is changing, upvote percentages, etc.
It’s not a personalized feed, but it’s farm from simple or objective. Look at how many people complain about reddits many different sorting algorithms
When people say “no algorithms”, they don’t mean literally no algorithm, because by definition there always is one. It’s clear what they are referring to.
I’ve not experienced that on Lemmy. It looks like simple descending sort by upvotes, similar to using the Sort function on Excel.
If you mean algorithm by “sorts biggest number to smallest”, you’d be correct
How does the “Hot” function work on Lemmy?
It’s the first sorting type on the Lemmy main page:
Tell me how this works without algorithms and just purely by sorting “biggest number to smallest”.
When they say “no algorithms”, they mean “no personally tailored bubble for your interests, all done to keep you engaged and enraged, while scrolling past ad impressions”
Obviously there’s an algorithm, even if it’s just sorting by times voted on in the last hour. It’s actually detailed here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
Does net neutrality being a state-level consideration now have any impact on this?
Glad to be a part of our open past and future with y’all <3
Don’t forget BBS’s
https://www.scisdata.com/connections/issue-4/what-is-an-electronic-bulletin-board/
I ran a few back in the day. Then FidoMail became a thing which you attached as a front end to your BBS. I ran Canadian hub for a while. I also had a separate D&D program a friend wrote that ran with my BBS. To log into the BBS you would use a program like Telix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telix
About 3-4 years before internet became a household thing I ran a dating system on an IBM AT clone with 2 8 port serial plugin ports with 16 US Robotic modems with 16 line equiv main number. Could have 16 peops chatting in the forums. Hehe everyone thought it was run off a mainframe. I wish I could remember the name of the custom dating software. I remember it was from California. Had a ton of fun with that site.
Make a website! No one is stopping you.
I have a few.
No one visits them though haha
People are acting like the fediverse will someday blow up. These days, if you want any sort of recognition, you need centralized social media. An example is comedians. Social media changed that whole profession.
If the Internet were a high school, decentralized social media certainly wouldn’t be the cool kids. They wouldn’t even be as cool as the band kids. They would be behind the DND/anime kid table watching over wishing they could be there.
I’ll check it out. Url?
Maybe we need to start webrings again
Imo Fediverse and instances is unnecessary jargon that presents a barrier to entry to new users.
As the OP said, Newsgroups, email etc ARE decentralized and people have been using them for decades.
What would you rather call them? I feel like you might as well be saying that cruise control is unnecessary jargon and is confusing to new drivers… Okay but would calling it acceleration latch be any less confusing for new drivers?
The defining characteristic of a new user is that they are unfamiliar with the system. You are never going to be able to reason around those who don’t want to learn something new.
What did you call Newsgroups and Email before “Instances” and Federation was coined?
Cruise control has been around for 50 years (email) and only now you want to call it acceleration latch.
It doesn’t matter how long something has been around if you are new to it.
Federation is a very old word that was, among other things, used to describe the creation of the Internet when the existing networks were integrated under Internet Protocol.
Electronic mail has, as far as I know, always been referred to as such. Even before the first modern email was sent over the ARPANET in 1971.
It doesn’t matter how long something has been around if you are new to it.
But your argument was the reverse of what happened. Everyone has been familiar with providers and servers for decades. Calling it an instance is unnecessary jargon.
I’m going to need a source for your claim that “Federation” has always been used to describe Internet services. The first use I heard was early 2000’s to describe single sign on directory services.
Again, it’s a distinction. To put it another way it’s like saying shoes have existed for ever so “flats” is unnecessary jargon. It is more specific than just shoe, likewise instance is more specific than just server or install. For those who don’t know what an instance is calling it a server isn’t going to be any more educational.
Its use in that context has its own Wikipedia page. The original word is the same root as federal like the US, EU, Russian Federation, Canada, Etc.
To put it another way it’s like saying shoes have existed for ever so “flats” is unnecessary jargon.
The complaint is about marketing to regular people, not using a more specific word that technical people understand.
Lemmy users, "I have a large sign over my store called ‘Flats’ Why don’t I get more people in my shoe store? "
Me, "Have you tried a sign that says ‘Shoes’ ? "Your claim was that Federated / Instance was used from the beginning of the Internet. That link shows its current application of the word. I’m not trying to be hostile. I’d actually like to know if I forgot/missed something. I was involved in building the Internet 30 years ago.
Regular people freaked out when the start button stopped saying “Start”. My point is that you either want to know what an instance is or you don’t care. It being a different word doesn’t matter to those who want to know.
I’m not sure what part of the article you didn’t understand. Obviously the article came later as Wikipedia hasn’t been around as long even the World Wide Web let alone the Internet. Federation has always been used to describe multiple entities agreeing on a framework. Whether that framework is political or computational or anything else.
I ain’t going to try the email analogy if I feel I should explain what Lemmy is, it can hardly be more confusing.
Seems pretty simple to me.
Explanation: “Do you use gmail? Do you have any friends that use outlook, or yahoo or something? Cool. So, you use one site, they use another, but everybody can communicate with everyone else? That’s what the fediverse is like.”
You know how email works, so you get it instantly, but for someone else it’ll be like “I have a Red car, you have a Blue car, but we can both drive to the same place!!”
“Like who cares if I have Gmail ?”
I mean that’d be what people think IMO.
Better not trying to explain the fediverse by it’s technology for starters, again IMO. Just explain what you can do, like there is twitter, reddit and forums or something more appealing.
I don’t think someone needs to know how email works to understand it. They just need to have a friend who isn’t using the same email service they are, and I bet just about everybody can relate to that.
*What is the fediverse? Ok, so do you use Gmail? Do you have friends that use Outlook or a company email? You use gmail, they don’t, but you can still send messages back and forth. So, imagine that for twitter. Right now the only people who can use twitter are people who have accounts on twitter.com. Mastodon is like that, but you don’t need to be on mastodon.org. It’s like email, you can be on any mastodon server you want and you can talk to all the other mastodon servers. What makes it better? Say someone like Elon Musk comes in and changes all the rules. On twitter, you are stuck, you have to stay on twitter.com and you have to live with Musk’s new rules. With Mastodon, if some jerk comes and takes over your instance, you can just move to a new one."
“what is a server”
You gotta up your pitch. But the part with Elon coming in and changing the rules is good IMO, that’s why the fediverse is better and why I’m here, for example. Not because some revolutionary email tech 😉.
While he’s got a point, he’s literally using a Ghibli AI picture.
Oh no. He’s not literally perfect!
I know right
This is the way.
America Online, Compuserve, Prodigy…
yeah, a agree with this post
The old web is still here.
You don’t use social media to recreate it. You make a homepage and you put links to the sites you like on it.
Where might I find these mystical places?
I like https://wiby.me/. It’s a search engine that only returns old-school pages. I like to click “surprise me” for random sites.
Neocities
This is going to sound cringe as hell but what’s neocities?
Why would assume being inquisitive as cringe ?? Anyways. It’s a host as well as a social-media of sorts but for websites. https://neocities.org/!
Thanks. I thought this would end up being a “how do you not know what [thing that used to be popular] is!? Kids these days…” moment
100%. I’ve been finding a ton of weird internet forums out there that are an odd mix of people. Fortunately, none of them are loaded with asshole 13 year olds, so it’s already objectively better than reddit.
For those of us old (and American) enough to remember AOL, we’re really just back to that. Open your Facebook (or corporate platform of choice), type a keyword, avoid the Big Scary World Wide Web.
You know the dial up sound was OPTIONAL?
atdts0
I think. It’s been a while.
