Lemmy’s security is largely in its obscurity. If the community ever gains the degree of popularity or prominence as Reddit, it will succumb to all the same socio-economic pressures.
Hell, Reddit’s origin story isn’t far off from Lemmy’s. A left-wing FOSS guy pioneers a novel means of aggregating information in a relatively decentralized and community-oriented way. But then the capitalists move in, he’s arrested, the administration of the site is auctioned off to VCs, and the site is slowly mutated into an echo chamber for neoliberal propagandists and reactionary agitators to scream at one another, drowning everything else out.
Lemmyites want to believe they’ve engineered a technical solution to what is ultimately a socio-economic problem. The human labor that makes Lemmy work can be attacked and replaced, the communities that form alienated from one another and censored by moderators and dispersed, and the popularity monetized here just like has happened elsewhere.
This isn’t a safe social media space. Its just a lingering redoubt in an internet that’s been under siege for decades.
As I understand it, the fediverse as a whole is composed of instances, each one communicating with whichever other instances it wishes (the instances acting as social medias of sorts). Each instance is created by people making their own thing, so if one large instance (such as Lemmy.world) were to get taken over by filthy capitalists, someone could simply make a new, separate instance and choose not to federate with Lemmy world. Is this not the case?
if one large instance (such as Lemmy.world) were to get taken over by filthy capitalists, someone could simply make a new, separate instance and choose not to federate with Lemmy world.
Websites get traded on the backend regularly without hemorrhaging their userbases. A large site is going to have a degree of inertia. People aren’t going to all simultaneously pick up out of .world and go to .world2 because someone on le.mee or .shi.tjustworks talks shit about the mods. There’s too much of a trust deficit, just for starters. And it would be a two-way street if it wasn’t (people in .world claiming le.mee was the one that got taken over and you should decamp from them to our instance).
Past that, you can always make a new website even before federation. The trick is then getting a working community to include you in their network of links and shares. Federation makes that process more explicit and more pronounced. But most local instances have learned not to federate with everyone in the fediverse (because there’s so much gnarly shit out there), which means doing promotion and negotiation to get your new instance recognized by the survivors.
In a single case of a single instance getting taken over, migration is possible if a bit painful. But if it happens repeatedly, thanks to a professional business team going after instances strategically while individual largely-ignorant users have to respond organically, then the Fediverse doesn’t have a chance over the long term. Eventually, the business interest gets control of enough high profile domains and pollutes the means of interpersonal communication to such a high degree that you either trust your instance or you abandon the Fediverse entirely.
It becomes a game of “Who Is The Werewolf?”, which strategically favors the werewolves.
It’s also propaganda. The more the recipients, the more valuable it becomes to dump huge amounts of money into controlling the narrative with propaganda posts, for which you don’t need admin control over the servers.
Reddit was never FOSS. Linux is still going stong, even with vested financial interests.
Most importantly, wie have already made the decision to leave traditional social media and build something better. If worst comes to wiorst, we’ll find each other again.
Reddit went full open-source in 2008 with a Github repo, did a (possibly deliberately) poor job of maintaining the repo despite this source code resulting in a plethora of 3rd party site enhancements and feature suites, then ultimately close its code nine years later.
Linux is still going stong, even with vested financial interests.
RedHat did Linux extremely dirty, and they’re hardly the first. It also has a significantly larger, more skilled, and more international userbase.
Most importantly, wie have already made the decision to leave traditional social media and build something better.
That’s a beautiful lie. Lemmy’s federation has been its pioneering feature, but it continues to backslide into Reddit-with-Extra-Steps. If anyone could claim they were building something truly novel, it was Mastadon. But that complexity and novelty has been an albatross around their necks since day one.
If worst comes to wiorst, we’ll find each other again.
Lemmy’s security is largely in its obscurity. If the community ever gains the degree of popularity or prominence as Reddit, it will succumb to all the same socio-economic pressures.
Hell, Reddit’s origin story isn’t far off from Lemmy’s. A left-wing FOSS guy pioneers a novel means of aggregating information in a relatively decentralized and community-oriented way. But then the capitalists move in, he’s arrested, the administration of the site is auctioned off to VCs, and the site is slowly mutated into an echo chamber for neoliberal propagandists and reactionary agitators to scream at one another, drowning everything else out.
Lemmyites want to believe they’ve engineered a technical solution to what is ultimately a socio-economic problem. The human labor that makes Lemmy work can be attacked and replaced, the communities that form alienated from one another and censored by moderators and dispersed, and the popularity monetized here just like has happened elsewhere.
This isn’t a safe social media space. Its just a lingering redoubt in an internet that’s been under siege for decades.
That it literally why we have Lemmy and other AP sites. Big corporations cannot take control of our spaces.
Likewise reddit was never decentralised.
As I understand it, the fediverse as a whole is composed of instances, each one communicating with whichever other instances it wishes (the instances acting as social medias of sorts). Each instance is created by people making their own thing, so if one large instance (such as Lemmy.world) were to get taken over by filthy capitalists, someone could simply make a new, separate instance and choose not to federate with Lemmy world. Is this not the case?
Websites get traded on the backend regularly without hemorrhaging their userbases. A large site is going to have a degree of inertia. People aren’t going to all simultaneously pick up out of .world and go to .world2 because someone on le.mee or .shi.tjustworks talks shit about the mods. There’s too much of a trust deficit, just for starters. And it would be a two-way street if it wasn’t (people in .world claiming le.mee was the one that got taken over and you should decamp from them to our instance).
Past that, you can always make a new website even before federation. The trick is then getting a working community to include you in their network of links and shares. Federation makes that process more explicit and more pronounced. But most local instances have learned not to federate with everyone in the fediverse (because there’s so much gnarly shit out there), which means doing promotion and negotiation to get your new instance recognized by the survivors.
In a single case of a single instance getting taken over, migration is possible if a bit painful. But if it happens repeatedly, thanks to a professional business team going after instances strategically while individual largely-ignorant users have to respond organically, then the Fediverse doesn’t have a chance over the long term. Eventually, the business interest gets control of enough high profile domains and pollutes the means of interpersonal communication to such a high degree that you either trust your instance or you abandon the Fediverse entirely.
It becomes a game of “Who Is The Werewolf?”, which strategically favors the werewolves.
It’s also propaganda. The more the recipients, the more valuable it becomes to dump huge amounts of money into controlling the narrative with propaganda posts, for which you don’t need admin control over the servers.
Reddit was never FOSS. Linux is still going stong, even with vested financial interests.
Most importantly, wie have already made the decision to leave traditional social media and build something better. If worst comes to wiorst, we’ll find each other again.
https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit?tab=License-1-ov-file
It was licensed under CPAL which is an approved license by both the FSF and OSI.
Reddit went full open-source in 2008 with a Github repo, did a (possibly deliberately) poor job of maintaining the repo despite this source code resulting in a plethora of 3rd party site enhancements and feature suites, then ultimately close its code nine years later.
RedHat did Linux extremely dirty, and they’re hardly the first. It also has a significantly larger, more skilled, and more international userbase.
That’s a beautiful lie. Lemmy’s federation has been its pioneering feature, but it continues to backslide into Reddit-with-Extra-Steps. If anyone could claim they were building something truly novel, it was Mastadon. But that complexity and novelty has been an albatross around their necks since day one.
:-/
I’ll find you, UnderpantsWeevil. Under every rock, under every pant I’ll look, till I find you precious weevil.
I stand corrected, although it seems to have beern a corporate gambit.
I can see where you’re coming from, reading you’re other reply in this thread, but I’ll just try to hold on to my idealism a bit longer :)