this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Fedigrow
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It's a flaw in the fediverse concept. Federation is great, but if you have a big server run by a freelance admin who decides to take some time off without notifying anyone people will search for a more reliable solution. Or just go back to reddit.
This is called the "bus factor". Any instance run by a single admin is extremely fragile.
That's why reliable servers have more than one single admin.
I guess we should educate more about that, actually I was surprised that feddit.de was run by a single person
Otoh, if one server is having issues, it's pretty trivial to swap to another. Whereas if reddit is down, it's down. No getting around that. If Lemmy.today is down, I can just swap to another server without issue (except being treated as a sus person just because my account says it's new).
Except the communities created on that instances all suffer. There were some popular ommunities on feddit.de that are now wastelands.
How are communities affected by such outages? Do they stop federating, but people can still see what other people from their own instance post?
You can't upload pictures and the web interface stopped working weeks ago. You can only make text posts via apps. Why would anyone make a post on that instance?
Can't you also post from other instances? I see new posts on [email protected] all the time
If you can at least post text, you can at least tell people where to migrate to. Doesn't seem like that big of an issue, but not being able to migrate all of the post history (AFAIK) is unfortunate (hopefully something is done to fix that shortcoming).
I can see at least one feddit.de community via web browser, so do you meant just the feddit.de web interface stopped working, but people on other instances still can see it? Or is it broken in ways other than simply being able to see the posts?
Are you viewing it from your instance or feddit.de? I can see all the feddit.de communities I subscribed to on sh.itjust.works, but I can't see the main site at all.
Viewing from my instance. Doesn't really seem like a big deal as long as the original content is still viewable from other instances, including viewing old account's history.
Federation makes sense for a Twitter replacement. Not so much for a Reddit replacement. I get the feeling that we are at an end to the experiment. Eventually, people will realize that we cannot replace Reddit with a Fediverse based solution.
Why not? Having a look at Hexbear and Lemmy.ml, I think they are good examples why instances are good.
Blahaj comes up as another example
So many instances block Hexbear and others. We are well on the path of creating separated communities, just with the added headache of having to police federation. Not to mention the problem of power users and out-of-control mods, which federation makes worse rather than solving them.
Ultimately, I think a real Reddit replacement will have to think hard about fixing the fundamental problems of this form of social media, rather than attempting to use buzzwords or cool new ideas.
We might, but compared to what it was when those very distinct group of people stumbled upon each other, it wasn't really pleasant either.
A potential scenario might be a few groups of federated servers
And I guess it's okay. People can move their subscriptions in two clicks anyway, it's easy to change instances
Again, that doesn't solve any of the fundamental problems of a Reddit-clone.
Anyways, our opinions don't matter. If I'm right, the communities we're on will quietly fade away.
Which problems are you thinking about? Network effect? Echo chamber due to voting system?
The main ones are that certain users or groups of users end up dominating each community, and that mods become abusive over time. Brigading and bigotry are big issues too. You also mentioned echo chambers, which I agree is another issue, although that is present in many social media platforms.
Unfortunately, federation doesn't solve these issues. At the very least, some kind of basic improvements are needed. Ideas like preventing large communities from dominating the front page, removing or limiting the effect of downvotes, or having more checks and balances for what mods can do, are necessary. But none of that happened. So this attempt at a Reddit clone is just ending up as a bad Reddit clone. Which is probably why Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin will slowly fade away, once people realize that it is just a Reddit clone.
This won't be the final attempt at creating a replacement for Reddit. Eventually, enshittification will destroy Reddit, and something else will replace it. But it probably won't be the Fediverse's attempt at it.
Interesting.
I think that power tripping is slightly prevented by having public modlogs. Doesn't completely prevent from happening, but at least people can call out on it.
For the echo chambers, an alternative to the down/up vote system would probably help, but that's not something I see happening in the near future. The upside is that we can still hope for it happen "one day" once the platforms (and including Piefed / Sublinks / Mbin) will be more mature
Perhaps. But it will likely be a hard break from the current setup, since the current one is not even close to working.