rglullis

Then you defederate from it too.

Okay, let me create an account on mastodon.social and use it to scrape content from every other instance.

Better yet, let me create an account on "i-want-privacy-in-a-public-internet.example.com" and access the federated timeline directly, then I can go and push the content from everyone into this discovery service.

What are they going to do? Unless they go to the point of asking for physical evidence behind the person asking for accounts and/or only give invitations to people they already know, and *completely shut down their own servers to the outside world, they will never be able to avoid data leakage.

And if they do get to do any of this, then what is the point of using anything based on ActivityPub? They will be better off by just using any of the existing group chat servers like Discord (or Matrix/XMPP if they still care about FOSS.)

Yeah, that's exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!

If everything is "decentralized", you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else's relay.

Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.

You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than "decentralizing" everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.

I think this is a great thing, but it will be massively criticized and shot down by the "Mah privacy" crowd. There is no way to avoid a competing implementation that will ignore privacy requests, and the moment someone finds out their content is out of their home instance, they will come with the pitchforks the same way they came after the bridgy developer.

Like I said, the content did not become unavailable. My instance still has the data from every community being followed.

The only unrecoverable problem with feddit.de is that the domain was lost. If the owner had given the domain to someone else, one could (theoretically) get all the identities back. They would need new keys, but the accounts would still be salvageable.

As for "separate frontend": this is already possible and like I said it is a matter of improving the existing clients. We don't need a fundamental change in the protocols to get what you want, we just need to get more resources available to developers so that they can continue working and improving on what we have.

The content itself is harder to be deleted, because federation means that every post comment gets duplicated on all instances.

You do have a point regarding identity, and this is something that bluesky has solved already in a more elegant way. But this is also fixable with activitypub: as Takahe already showed it is possible to efficiently serve different domains with the same server. And on the extreme case, you can run your instance.

The issues are describing are real, but can be solved with better clients.

Yeah, it's weird. It is showing on popular accounts, though.

AFAIK, the increased users on fedidb are from Threads.

What are you basing these feelings on?

For every "welcome" post, you can find 10 other comments that amount to "I left Reddit because their users are toxic/suck/stupid".

One of the biggest complaints about the Reddit mirrors is "if I wanted to see Reddit content, I'd go to Reddit".

Go check the posts about Fediverser, see how many people are opposed to it on the grounds of "I don't want to bring more people here".

BlueSky got 8 millions from investors, expecting Lemmy, Mbin or Piefed so have the same level of development is unrealistic:

So now you understand why it matters to value the work of developers?

The only problem of excessive optimism is that you might end up alone in a hill which is not worth fighting for.

As a whole, ActivityPub servers have been losing users since its peak in 2022. We were given all the opportunity in the world to build on that momentum with the Reddit fiasco, but were absolutely afraid to grow. Until today, the discourse reeks of elitism with the "I don't redditors here".

Meanwhile, Bluesky has focused on building a product that can be used by the masses, without acting pretentious about who they wanted to be there. They were already getting a.sunstantial crowd from Mastodon, now they are taking the Brazilians we well.

The momentum is not in our favor, and our reactionary, anti-growth culture is not helping.