you're welcome!
rysiek
joined 4 years ago
Then, the platform removed John Mastodon, the founder of a competing social media company named after himself, for posting a link to the jet tracker’s Mastodon account.
Blocking a somewhat fluctuating list of 25k+ instances is still considerably harder than blocking a pretty stable infrastructure of a single major social media platform.
I still think that fedi will help, and in fact I am pretty sure it is helping already, simply because it is quite decentralized. Blocking 20k+ instances is not trivial. And each of these instances is an entrypoint, so to speak, into the broader fedi. Missing even one is thus a big deal. If my instance is blocked, I can set up an account on a different one, follow the same people, and I am back in business.
At the same time all these instances are run independently. One can't simply threaten the whole fedi to force it to do a thing (say, take down an account), this just does not make sense.
Compare and contrast with centralized services like Facebook, gatekeepers like Cloudflare, and so on. Threatening one big entity with problems might be enough to "convince it" to take a thing down.
The reason governments and other powerful entities are able to control the information flow is because there are these hugely important single points of failure. Fedi is not perfect (mastodon.social is way too big for its own good…), but it is a step in the right direction.
HAproxy cannot serve static files directly. You need a webserver behind it for that.
Apache is slow.
Nginx is both a capable, fast reverse-proxy, and a capable, fast webserver. It can do everything HAproxy does, and what Apache does, and more.
I am not saying it is absolutely best for every use-case, but this flexibility is a large part of why I use it in my infra (nad have been using it for a decade).
What absolute bull. 🤦
fixed again. jeebus.
Updated with a new link from EBU.
I think throwing around vague but scary-sounding terms like "compromised" is a very bad idea.
I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing.
Good to hear.
They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.
Yeah. Plus, the sheer size of mastodon.social and the monoculture of Mastodon-based instances is just unhealthy. I wrote about it at length.
This Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.
Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps "whatever Mastodon is doing". That's problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.
I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That's fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.
cross-posted from: https://szmer.info/post/349217
As much as there is plenty of new people joining the threadiverse, the real wave starts today, with thousands of subreddits going dark.
Existing Lemmy/Kbin instances get hammered with new user registrations and deploy different coping strategies. Some plead, some close registrations. New instances spring up.
Soon, mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists. They will probably miss Kbin entirely, and most will also be very confused about the federated nature of Lemmy. Some might be able to remember Fediverse exists.
When Kbin finally shows up on their radar, they will find it difficult to explain how it fits into the narrative they already spun. My money is on someone calling it a "fork" of Lemmy. 🤣
Eventually, as more instances start turning off registrations, and as some buckle under the load temporarily, the narrative becomes "this is why Lemmy will fail." Threadiverse will get treated like a VC-funded walled garden. Media will be flabberghasted at how "poorly" Lemmy and Kbin were able to "capture" the people wanting to migrate off of Reddit. They will complain endlessly about how hard it is to choose an instance, "confusing interface", and ask "thoughtful" questions on "how will they monetize".
Eventually, the wave subsides. Maybe Reddit reverses their silly ideas, maybe people get tired. There is a drop in active user accounts on the Threadiverse, compared to the peak of the wave, which is then taken as "proof positive" that Lemmy and Kbin could never "succeed".
What they will ignore, of course, is that by then Threadiverse is several times bigger and more active than before all the Reddit insanity. Communities stay active, people stay active, and slowly Threadiverse grows, as (just like the broader Fediverse) it is not a VC-funded startup that needs a hokey-stick growth.
It's a long-term project of making community-run platforms work. And that takes time, and effort, and love.
Looks like KBin has an edge over Lemmy now in terms of monthly active users.
It's obviously a pretty silly thing, and is not in any way indicative of which project is "better" or more "long-term viable" or anything — instances of both federate with one another, and with the rest of fedi, so it's all one happy family.
That said, it's notable. KBin is a relative newcomer to the "Reddit-like fedi instance" game, and also does not have the tankie baggage.
Anyway, the more, the merrier!
KBin: https://the-federation.info/platform/184
Lemmy: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
Discussion on fedi: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110527049024028986
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thanks, I should have provided that link.