I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn’t come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they’re either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I’m on Bluesky too, but once that goes I’ll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
There is no single point of failure.
If one instance goes down they don’t take the whole thing with it. If one instance gets taken over by corporate interests, it does not take all the other instances with it.
If a community on sweatyballs.social is dogshit, someone can create the same named community on poopfed.io as a replacement. The site administrator of sweatyballs.social can’t do anything about that.
This can also be a negative to some degree, but being able to block and defederate allow for mitigating those risks.
The biggest thing is control and censorship.
On the corporate side if your posts and content are seen as too extreme in one way or another, depending on what government or group … you can be censored and have you posted either deleted, dismissed or hidden. In extreme cases, your account can also be shut down.
Xitter is already a propaganda hell hole that only pushes right wing content because they pushed out any criticism.
FB actively pushes its own content based on the highest bidder which often just means pushing right wing and conservative content in a regular basis.
Bluesky as open as it’s supposed to be has already had problems in Turkey where the government there asked bluesky to restrict access to many accounts.
The Fediverse will have these same problems and people and governments will try to censor people but due to the open non centralized nature of the system, it will be much harder for any one group or government to censor anyone. The only way they could shut it down would be to completely outlaw any platform that uses the protocol everywhere.
There’s 1️⃣ unique draw to the fediverse : depending on service , you can (view|interact with) all different kinds of posts without (necessarily) needing to create separate accounts for different services (experience will vary depending on what software your instance runs though) . Examples :
- Can view (peertube|pixelfed|lemmy|.*) posts directly from your mastodon account
- [km]bin are threadiverse softwares that also allow you to (view|post) the twitterlike style posts you see on (mastodon|(.*)(oma|key)|.*) instances and not just reddit style threadiverse posts
… but that’s about where tangible benefits end IMO . Fediverse only better in (technical|data privacy|potentiality) sense , may be more resistant to enshittification (tangent : wish there was better word for this , “enshittification” sounds kinda stupid IMHO) but don’t believe it’s completely immune
Also I’ve seen enough fedimeta to know “run by huge dickwads” not (exclusive to centralised services|isolated issue) . Every other big fediverse (instance|project) feels like it’s managed by temporarily embarrassed (Elon musk|matt mullenweg)s , so like , pick your poison !
Aside from the theoretical reasons, which are great, it feels like on the federated services there’s less speaking at people, and more actual conversations.
No single entity can ruin it. We’ve seen that happen over and over when someone’s political or economic goals conflict with user interests.
BlueSky actually talks about this quite a bit, viewing the company as a potential future adversary of the current developers’ goals. I’m not sure their design choices align with that in practice, but they articulate the argument well.
Another cool thing is the broader reach federation provides. Someone with a Wordpress site need only install a plugin and people can follow it with Mastodon and the like. Tag a community in a post and it shows up on Lemmy too. This is underused so far, but I hope to see it continue to grow.
I’ve only just begun on this, but my next software project is to rewrite my blogging software to use ActivityPub, especially for comments.
I use a variation of this approach to display fediverse comments on a statically-generated site. It does involve a manual post to Mastodon, but I’m not very inclined to redo the whole site.
The Fediverse is controlled by the people. Mainstream social media is controlled by wannabe kings.
control is dispersed and you can flee bs to a better instance. This makes it almost impossible to censor in a targeted way.
Its more obvious on Mastodon since Mastodon federates with everybody. Imagine, while being on Twitter and without leaving the Twitter app, being able to post and comment on Reddit, watch YouTube videos and leave comments, and also interact with people on Instagram and Facebook. Some blogs also federate too via WordPress. I know you dont have to imagine that since you’re here, but when I first started out it blew my mind.
Now, the way I phrase it to people I’m pitching the platforms to is “You get to choose whether you want to be in the hands of either a Corp that wants to turn you into profits for their shareholders, or you can put your data in the hands of some autistic dork who is really, really passionate about either server architecture or infosec. There’s pros and cons there. Bluesky and Twitter fundamentally are not on your side, they want money from somewhere, but they can afford to pay people to both keep their servers running efficiently and defend against bad actors. The admins of Lemmy and Mastodon are fundamentally on our side, but the quality you’re going to see is on par with a hobby project.”
No fucking algorithm, honestly. I don’t need some rich white pricks trying to constantly show me what they want me to see.
Lemmy has an algorithm though (active, hot, and scaled sorting)
I think you mean that you can choose a project that doesn’t have an “algorithm” (in the sense that you’re conveying).
Anyone can create a project with ActivityPub that has an algorithm for feeding content to you.
Yep! This exactly.
Content is not being actively pushed upon you, rather it’s you that decide what you see like Facebook was at the beginning.
It allows you to use the platform to keep up with other people’s lives instead of watching ads, news article someone liked and you’re not interested in and ragebait.
In your example, if bluesky goes you lose it all (until/if their form of federation actually exists and is usable). If the Mastodon server I’m on (toot.community, because I like the name) goes, you move to another or host your own and keep on trucking.
When reddit did their API shit i left and lost the account, subreddits, apps, everything. When Lemm.ee announced it’s shutdown i moved to lemmy.zip and picked up exactly where I left off.
The special thing about federated social media is that if you don’t like something about one specific instance you can go to another instance or even create your own and still be part of the whole system. You’re not stuck with some leadership that you have to endure. Instead you can be your own boss or choose a nice place to stay.
I think all the other things that people like about it, like “no algorithm”, come naturally from this fact but are not inherent to the system.
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AOL had a social media platform. So did MySpace. They were monolithic. Where are they now?
New platforms can set up shop and already have an existing userbase/contentbase to show. The main issue with setting up, let’s say, an Instagram competitor, is that nobody uses it, so nobody will use it as it lacks content. ActivityPub removes this problem. If someone wanted to set up their own competitor to Mastodon, they can. People can use it and tap into the existing userbase.
Good point: Look at lemmy - kbin - piefed. The guy behind kbin thought “lemmy is nice but I could make something better”, and then whoever is behind mbin saw that and said “I can make kbin better” and forked it. But without starting over in terms of connectivity or content! And now we have piefed which is on the edge of being even better and it’s still introperable. The power of that can’t be undersold.
I think that’s basically the whole point. Or if someone would rather use Mastodon - look, the lemmy userbase is there as well!
Piefed, Mbin and Lemmy aren’t necessarily aggressively competing like X and Bluesky are. It’s moreso friendly cooperation. Sure, if the fediverse was a bit more commercialised, you’d have competition. But it would be fairer competition based on how good your Software and ethics are and not on who else is also using the app.