Yeah, that's a tough one. I have mixed feelings about it.
What I'd really like to see is a benevolent, impartial non-profit act as an umbrella organization that stewards a lot of this critical infrastructure. Non-profits aren't perfect, and there are lots of questions regarding funding and sponsorships and the ethics of taking money from, say, Meta. But, I think such a thing could be really positive in the right hands.
Yeah, it's definitely a weird problem. My initial reaction was something along the lines of "Isn't there a decentralized way to do this?!" and...to my knowledge, there really isn't? Like, you could distribute knowledge of user account associations across every instance in a peer-to-peer way, I guess, but that's kind of ridiculous and pretty wasteful.
I think having small central services that improve the quality of life for decentralized services is largely a good thing, so long as they're open source and not just some corporate product with vendor lock-in. It does kind of feel like a contradiction in terms, sometimes.
Hey, I'm the guy who started the .ml fediverse community. I started it with the Lemmy part of the network was young, and there weren't many instances yet. It's become a very active community, and I'm constantly amazed to see how much faster things move these days.
This has kind of been an ongoing conversation in some prior feature request discussions for Lemmy. One idea is that communities could consensually relay posts from one together, effectively creating a group containing Group Actors. This would probably cut down on duplicate content, but could create a larger surface vector for spam. But, I think it's an interesting idea.
I don't really have a full idea of what the best solution is. A Fediverse-specific instance similar to socialhub.activitypub.rocks could be a really interesting experiment, in that it would try to serve as a "Neutral Zone" between instances while sharing all kinds of news.
In the end, I don't really have much of a horse in this race. I think cutting down on duplication and redundant communities in favor of a more active shared space would probably have a lot of benefits, there's always going to be independent communities dedicated to the same theme on some far-off server. I'm not really interested in preventing anybody from starting their own.
I'm pretty curious about Veilid, and eager to check it out. But, I believe that peer-to-peer and federated could theoretically complement each other very well, especially when it comes to building infrastructure for this big weird network we're a part of.
It's funny. When I was typing my original response, I was under the impression that Dendrite was Rust-based! 😂 I'm really glad I checked before posting!
Yeah, admittedly I rushed that part, and should've taken more time for details. My biggest guess is that the chat app will just be a client for Fediverse server users to sign into, with all the conversations happening off-server in a client. That's the only way I could think of this working, with the way that the network currently operates.
In the future, it might be possible for a lot of different Fediverse servers to natively support encrypted chat. But, these are all just guesstimates, and I'm not even sure that the lead dev is ready to publicly comment on a set-in-stone policy. Likely, there's probably a lot of experimentation happening.
Yeah, my current guess for how this will work is that users will do an OAuth sign-in dance with their Fedi accounts to a client that is mostly not connected to their personal accounts in any meaningful way, beyond viewing contacts that have also signed in to the client. The client itself could store the encrypted chat, rather than having it reside on any server.
Eventually, we may be far enough along at a point that the ActivityPub protocol could have an enhancement proposal for supporting chat, and apps like Sup could plug into servers in a more native way, where the conversation data lives encrypted on the server.
This is all just conjecture on my part, but it seems like a viable way to work around current network limitations.
I personally really like Matrix, but there are a few outstanding complaints about it. The biggest one is that the reference implementation everyone uses by default is known to be bloated and slow, and poor at scaling. Server admins have had a huge challenge of supporting a large amount of data for things like room history, which in the past required propagation to every server hosting every participant. The protocol itself has been described by some developers as overtly complex.
Some of this seems to be improving, particularly with development of a Go-based backend implementation, Dendrite.
He's working on multiple things at once. Where he finds the energy, I don't know, but PubKit, Sup, and a few other things are all happening right now.
This one article is part of a series where I'm hoping to put up one feature per day of what he's been working on. Pixelfed is notoriously hard to cover, because the lead dev is so active.
I think it's intended to be more like WhatsApp, in the sense that you use it for one-on-one chats or messaging small friend groups. I don't think it's a current goal to try to take on Matrix / Element.
Nobody is telling you to use it. This originally spun out of development of a messaging app just for Pixelfed, but evolved when the dev realized it could be made to work with any Fediverse account, not just his own server project.
An optimistic view is that it could end up opening the door for end-to-end encryption to come to private messages in Fediverse servers, over time.
To be clear: IFTAS is not a for-profit running off of venture capital. It is a 501(c)3 non-profit that is temporarily sponsored by another organization, New Venture Fund, itself a charity organization for grants and things of that nature. The sponsorship is only in place until the IRS formally recognizes IFTAS.
Secondly: setting up an organization as a resource to help moderators and admins navigate a myriad of shitty issues is hardly the same thing as centralizing critical infrastructure. You'll still be and to host and instance regardless of whether you take part in the organization.
The real benefit of efforts like IFTAS is that it provides needed resources and tools for Trust and Safety in a network that has historically lacked anything of the sort. Instead of mods and admins just winging it by themselves, they can have access to resources, training, and contacts who actually work in the T&S field. Additionally, the organization is collaborating on tools to make the process suck less for everybody.
I agree that the problem isn't with the Fediverse itself, any more than it is with email, usenet, encrypted messengers, etc.
The thing is, it's a problem that affects the network. While "block and move on" is a reasonable strategy for getting that crap out of your own instance's feeds, the real meat and potatoes of the issue have to do with legal and legislative repercussions. If an admin comes across this stuff, they have a legal obligation to report it, in most jurisdictions. In fact, the EARN IT and STOP CSAM acts that politicians are trying to push through Congress are likely to make companies overreact to any potential penalty that could come from accidental cross-pollination of CSAM between servers.
Unfortunately, this thing becomes a whole lot messier when an instance discovers cached CSAM after the fact. There was a Mastodon instance that was recently taken down without any turnaround time given to the admin to look into it, the hosting company was just ordered to comply with a CSAM request that basically said "This server has child porn on it."
Also, regardless of whether you report it or block it and pretend you never saw anything, that doesn't change the fact that it's still happening. At the very least, having tooling to make the reporting easier would probably be a big boon to knocking those servers off the network.
Yeah, that's a tough one. I have mixed feelings about it.
What I'd really like to see is a benevolent, impartial non-profit act as an umbrella organization that stewards a lot of this critical infrastructure. Non-profits aren't perfect, and there are lots of questions regarding funding and sponsorships and the ethics of taking money from, say, Meta. But, I think such a thing could be really positive in the right hands.