I'm a long-time contributor to the space, and have been here for over 15 years. I was on the Fediverse when it was literally one or two platforms, and I witnessed the whole thing grow and evolve. I've seen the entire thing take shape, and change with every subsequent wave of platform, user migration, and major pivot.
I also ran community management for one of the large-scale early projects here.
A huge motivating factor of mine has been to write about a nascent and evolving space that I'm passionate about, often because no one else has been writing about it. I grew my own publication, We Distribute, out of it, and it's my responsibility to report on different aspects of what happens in the space. Sometimes, the news is ugly.
My personal blog at my domain is unrelated to that, and is more just random brain droppings based on whenever I feel like putting out personal thoughts based on my experiences. There's nothing malicious about that.
No, you're good, and we're mostly on the same page! My general expectation is that your server tries its best, maybe there are still copies out there, but you shrug and say "eh, I wiped my stuff locally, good enough".
But yeah, I agree that once something leaves your server in terms of the passage of data, there are no guarantees. And I do agree that significant structural changes are necessary and important for the network's continued evolution!
There's nothing wrong with having good third-party tools, that was not my point. db0 in particular has done some amazing, amazing work.
What's fucked, however, is having a project:
whose core infrastructure only offers the most threadbare tools
there's zero consideration from development on privacy, user safety, or basic controls to handle when shit hits the bed
the devs are stone silent when waves of CSAM crash through instances
they openly mock people or say they're "too busy to do this" when it comes to meeting the most basic expectations of how a social platform ought to work.
Like, this is not an attack on Lemmy itself, I think the platform can be a real force for good in the Fediverse. But let's be honest, this project is not going to live very long if nothing changes.
Basic things like having the ability to easily remove images from storage should be part of the core platform. The fact that this still isn't a thing even four years into the project is insane.
Yeah, I agree. I think the important thing is "was the local content scrubbed?" Because at least if that was done, the place of origin no longer has it.
Federated deletes will always be imperfect, but I'd rather have them than not have them.
What might actually be interesting would be if someone could figure out this type of content negotiation: deletes get federated, some servers miss it. Maybe there's a way to get servers to check the cache and, if a corresponding origin value is no longer there, dump it?
So, to be clear, the story the article links to is specifically a case of local content that didn't actually federate. It was an accidental upload, he cancelled the post, it sat in storage, and even his admin was stumped about how to get it out.
I agree that with federation, it's a lot more messy. But, having provisions to delete things locally, and try to push out deletes across the network, is absolutely better than nothing.
The biggest issue I have is that there's really not much an admin can do at the moment if CSAM or some other horrific shit gets into pict-rs, short of using a tool to crawl through the database and use API calls to hackily delete things. Federation aside, at least make it easy for admins and mods to handle this on their home servers.
We actually already have some interviews recorded, it's just that some of the unedited talks are two hours long. But yes, this is something we're actively working on!
I loved the voice of the friend who emphasizes the "sh"s :)
I assume you mean Laurens from the Fediverse Report. He's from the Netherlands, and has a wonderful accent and demeanor.
Thank you for your feedback. In the interest of working around this, the embed has been replaced by a video that we downloaded from the announcement post (which we were trying to get anyway) and just used that instead.
Thank you. ❤️ I know, and I'm doing my best. It's just my first real experience of dealing with any of this as an adult, and I don't think I've ugly cried harder in my life.
I'm about to fly East next week, to bury my grandfather. I think it will be good for me, but it hurts to let go of someone that so many of my happy memories stemmed from.
It's also a horrifying thought to me that this is the logical conclusion of "growing old with someone". One of you is going to go first, and it's going to be the worst pain the other person has ever felt.
My grandfather suddenly passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer, multiple strokes, and COVID. It was brutal, he was in so much pain for months. What really hurts is that he was a wonderful person, a source of great joy and insight, and most definitely the person who got me into computers at a young age. My youngest coherent memories are of him, and the loss is exceedingly painful.
My stepfather pointed a loaded gun at my autistic little brother and basically kicked him to the street. My little brother has had his fair share of problems with holding down any kind of job, and can barely take care of himself. He was kicked out of a shelter for a messy living space, and living out of a tent next to a YMCA.
My mom was living in fear for a while, as my stepdad increasingly became more paranoid and violent, to the point that she was no longer allowed to talk to us on the phone if he came home. She managed to give him the slip and take the kids with her to go take care of the grandfather on the other side of the country....but, she's in for a messy divorce.
These three things have kind of converged, and a lot of it is starting to resolve finally, but it's been a massive strain on my mental health and my marriage. I'm barely taking care of myself most of the time, and trying to live with anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation...and all of the fun side effects of trying to treat those things with therapy and medication.
I'm so tired. I'm barely eating. I have six months left in a maintenance squadron before I get out of the military, and all I want to do is scream.
Unfortunately, even if instance admins were to unanimously defederate, Meta—or any social media corporation—could create white-label instances to take their place, and we might be none the wiser of their control of them.
I don't necessarily disagree with this idea, but they would have to justify the business case to their shareholders. As of right now, the idea of a whitelabel personal silo is a limited value proposition to people not already invested in the Fediverse. If it's whitelabel, what will Meta do? Start a new company? Inevitably, people would figure it out, and go with something else.
It’s true that we can always choose to defederate from them. What’s to worry about is their meddling with the ActivityPub standard using their incomparably vast resources, and them making their own extensions to the standard in efforts to suck users back into the Borg. Things like that.
I said this a little further up in the conversation, but if Meta produces some horrendous, awful version of ActivityPub that only benefits them, what's stopping the rest of us from forking the protocol or adopting a different one? If we never switch to their version of doing things, and there's feature breakage between us and Meta, who actually loses here?
Thank you for your response, I appreciate your insights!
I think if there were really serious problems with a future version of ActivityPub, we could feasibly do one of two things:
Maintain a fork of the protocol - this has actually already happened once, with an implementation standard called Litepub.
Move over to a different protocol, such as Zot.
The second route is probably much harder, but there's no real reason why a zombified Meta version of the protocol would do much of anything to anybody running vanilla ActivityPub at this time. You'd probably have some feature incompatibilities and breakage, but...if you're not going to federate with them anyway, what can they actually do?
It's all good, I don't even take myself seriously most of the time. Most of what I have to say is dumb shit anyway.
Real talk, though: I legitimately think that Threads is incapable of actually extinguishing a federated network powered by open standards. Yeah, the infighting might fragment us, and the influx of millions of activities and interactions might overwhelm servers that connect with it. To some extent, they can propose protocol extensions and features and even make an ecosystem push with tooling.
But, so long as servers are federating via an open protocol, no entity can truly snuff out the network in its entirety. An actual EEE move would not actually work here: if they ever made such an attempt, we'd just defederate them.
My article is not a point about how we all need to shut up and start worshipping Meta, but that the things we ought to be most concerned about are in fact the things we've always neglected: actual user control over data, the ability for people to decide for themselves on what to connect to, and dealing with the technical requirements of hundreds of millions of people worth of traffic. And that's just to start! If we want to reach the masses, we have to prepare for these things.
Thanks, fixed. Posting was a little broken earlier, and I made some incorrect assumptions about manually entering in metadata for the link (Kbin lets you upload the thumbnail manually).
I don't think it was intentional, the dev seemed to be struggling with health-related problems and possibly burnout. But yeah, definitely a depressing moment for an otherwise really cool project.
I'm a long-time contributor to the space, and have been here for over 15 years. I was on the Fediverse when it was literally one or two platforms, and I witnessed the whole thing grow and evolve. I've seen the entire thing take shape, and change with every subsequent wave of platform, user migration, and major pivot.
I also ran community management for one of the large-scale early projects here.
A huge motivating factor of mine has been to write about a nascent and evolving space that I'm passionate about, often because no one else has been writing about it. I grew my own publication, We Distribute, out of it, and it's my responsibility to report on different aspects of what happens in the space. Sometimes, the news is ugly.
My personal blog at my domain is unrelated to that, and is more just random brain droppings based on whenever I feel like putting out personal thoughts based on my experiences. There's nothing malicious about that.