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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Fediverse
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Disagree. Indeed, I couldn't disagree more strongly.
Instances are not just abstract server nodes in some overly wasteful recreation of some other website. This is the world wide social web as it should have been.
You may as well argue that websites should be indistinguishable from each other.
This isn't Reddit. Full stop. And it's not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It's not "Reddit, but different". It's a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It's very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.
It will never get to reach its potential if we decide it needs to be nothing more than a simulacra of what came before it.
This is my stance too - we took a wrong turn letting initially utopian tech companies create vast eyeball-farming dystopias when the natural progression from forums and blogs is breaking them out of their silos (not building bigger ones) and letting them talk to each other.
Indeed. It's early days still and the Reddit diaspora has shaped the initial growth but, as it spreads beyond that, it will expand and mutate. Already kbin have a kind of forum/microblogging thing going and it will be interesting to see how things evolve from here. With better moderation tools, I could see people skipping setting up their own forum and blog and just spinning up an instance instead - there are too many advantages to not do it. That'll drag in a more diverse group of people with different needs and requirements that will push development in new directions. I, for one, can't wait to see where this all goes.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there already exists a proposal to make communities work more like a cloud.
It's just a matter of time before Lemmy and Kbin implement this.
It's a proposal, not a certainty. There've been a bunch of proposals for ways to allow people to aggregate communities from multiple instances together and it'll be a handy tool to have, but it doesn't change the fundamental properties of the Fediverse. It just makes it more convenient to use it in various different ways.
Websites are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Federated instances can be like web service providers, only limiting malicious content from users. The magazines/communities are like web sites on a particular host, such as WordPress. They control the content within their scope.
What you are suggesting is that instances should be like AOL, curating the experience. Which is fine if some of them want to do that, but it shouldn't be the standard.
What he's suggesting is that instances can be like AOL. Not that they have to be. Each instance can present whatever sort of interface to the fediverse that it wants, and people can pick and choose which one they like.
Newspapers are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Books are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Movies are indistinguishable from each other except for their content.
Yep, it's just as vapid no matter what media you plug in there.
To use a somewhat stretched analogy. Instances should be like bitcoin miners, I don't need to know much about them individually at all. My only concern is that there isn't a majority miner/instance.
It doesn't have to be a reddit clone, but the federation needs to move to a more mandatory model, and one that puts the content first. The current system is far too user hostile to allow anything but the lowest common denominator of communities.
Miners are trying to make money, which is why having a faceless and generic flavour/community is irrelevant.
That's not what motivates folk running lemmy instances