I came across this community, which it reminded me of your choice of avatar, and figured you'd be interested:
Dang, I've been using sync for more than a decade, and even I did not know that sync had multi window support on Android. I think there needs to be a continuous education workshop, video tutorial series, or a sphinx style docs site on all these features when the beta dust settles. Multi tasking is so handy. FYI:
740
Google Tries to Defend Its Web Environment Integrity as Critics Slam It as Dangerous
(techreport.com)
Seems like votes are public, thus auditable for instance of origin, vote manipulation and brigading:
- YSK: Your Lemmy activities (e.g. downvotes) are far from private
Although, support for more capable polling features would still be preferable.
We can defederate at any point
Could we re-federate at any point as well? Perhaps after ActivityPup establishes some form of protocol ossification, like email or sms, curbing the potential for it to be effectively owned by a majority platform? Would that take too long, and thus dissuade corporate adoption?
If we held off on supporting Facebook first, and federated with smaller governmental agencies, news outlets, academic institutions, encouraging them to host their own ActivityPup servers instead of solely relying on Twitter or Facebook for public communication, just as they already do for website and email domains, could that help speed up the ossification process?
By essentially giving FOSS platforms and protocols a longer runway before federating with Facebook, it could give ActivityPup greater time to cement more diverse stakeholders, calming the Fediverse's historic fears of repeated "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" antics, particularly when dealing with the largest FANG conglomerates on earth.
It looks like midwest.social is listed as both linked and blocked. Quite strange. That instance is rather benign, as far as I can tell. @snowe@programming.dev , did we block that domain temporarily due to federation load issues?
Yeah, I actually think lemmy could benefit from improved scraping and indexing. For example, it'd really help if more search engines could natively understand Lemmy's federated nature, e.g:
- Deduplicate links by prioritising results for instances hosting the community that a post was originally submitted to.
- Include and denote cross posts by recognizing order of submission timestamp and prioritizing popularity via vote ratios, comment counts, and lurker click-through traffic.
- Do the same deduplication and prioritization across instances, but for comments as well.
Another use case besides search engines would be for internet archive projects, helping to preserve historic internet content even in the face of lemmy instances falling offline and disappearing. For example, much knowledge was lost to us due to the Twitter APIoplicips and Reddit Blackout: E.g:
Most of the above will only ever be possible due to improved scraping or even federation APIs.
Related discussions and relevant news:
- Should programming.dev defederate from Meta if they implement ActivityPub?
- Second largest Lemmy instance preemptively un-friends Facebook
- Lemmy.World Admins: "Watching Like A hawk, with our fingers on the block button"
- Does Lemm.ee plan to de-federate from instagram threads?
Related articles and opinion pieces:
- https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/06/19/not-that-kind-of-open
- counter argument
- https://wedistribute.org/2023/06/john-gruber-no-understand/
- rebuttals to counter
- https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- historic precedent and prevailing trends with open protocols
- https://ploum.net/2023-07-06-stop-trying-to-make-social-networks-succeed.html
- argument for local communities and against universal social networks
Yeah, then people could comment with links to the exact heading of the feature or change they wanted to bring up, e.g. what they've been long awaiting for, or what they don't understand why would it be a big deal.
And so it begins. Second largest Lemmy instance preemptively un-friends Facebook:
- Lemmy.ml has now blocked threads.net / Meta
We could have collabs with other communities on the instance, such as mega threads to discuss developer setups and vscode configurations for the programming language or framework that is the topic of focus for the other collabing community. E.g. if I'm a Python, or a Rust developer, I'd like to annually synchronize with all the other vscode users in my sub domain about what new extensions they're using for the language, what kind of Dev containers configuration are they using amongst their development team, are there any major ergonomic improvements they discovered over the last year. If we did that for every language or framework hosted on this instance and space it out over a year, that could keep the community fairly active.
Hidden gem threads! We could periodically ask folks to comment in posts about what extensions are vscode's best kept secret and why for rotating criterions and or categories.
Maybe some periodic posts like monthly patch notes?
The patch notes can get rather long, with so much detail and pages of updates. It'd be nice to have a monthly mega thread when those get released to discuss and highlight the most notable features and share commentary and clarifications about changes. I never manage to read those all the way through, so I feel like Im always missing something. A monthly mega thread linked to patch notes when published, with folks up voting the hottest features in the comments, would help to stay on top of it all.
In reply to an offline discussion:
Increase adoption? Probably, but taking a more pragmatic standpoint, setting aside Facebook's notorious history, I'd prefer a more cautious approach by first incentivizing organizations, institutions, and perhaps even individuals to join the FediVerse by not relying on a centralized instance.
If users can spread out using other federated platforms, diversifying stakeholders in the network, then this could help establish some degree of protocol ossification for ActivityPup.
In this regard, I shared similar concerns with reddit users who were at first asking app developers to trivialise user onboarding by defaulting everyone to lemmy.world . Given recent security incidents, I think this week has been a notable (if not a thankfully early and forgiving) reminder of the perils of putting all our eggs into one basket/instance. IMHO, sustaining perpetual diversity of our network is key for the Fediverse's survival, and perhaps for the Internet itself in general.
Instead, we could prioritize federating with more independent stakeholders first, rather than with a single social media instance that is already larger (by several orders of magnitude) than the current Lemmy-verse, let alone the entire Fediverse.
Sources:
There are defeatists that suggest if ActivityPup can not passively withstand such onslaughts, then it's domize is already assured. Yet I would argue that communities are not passive, and that maintaining a public garden takes proactive efforts and vigilance, lest it be lost and succumb to wild overgrowth or a monoculture of human induced invasive species. Thus we should strategically seek to federate with instances that have self invested communities focused on self preservation, rather than instances that only have fiduciary obligations in monetization.
If I could stretch this agricultural medafor to its limits, then I'd say we do not yet have the moderation tooling or modern farming equipment to cultivate quality content on an industrial scale. Taking on to much land at once without enough self invested community members, where we'd have to pick up the slack as unpaid moderators (cough-Reddit), could lead to mismanagement of limited (and voluntary) resources. Given the historic issues of content moderation on Facebook's platform, and my impression that Facebook users in general are ambivalent to the self preservation of the company in comparison to its hosted content, I think it safe to say we'd have better success in learning to walk before attempting to run with global scale conglomerates.
While some may feel this remains a philosophical argument, I'd argue it is more of a pragmatic one, given the current maturity of the Lemmy software, the scale of current stakeholders, and realistic resources at our current disposal, taking on Facebook's level of traffic would be biting off more than we could chew.