So on that classifications comment it’s me not caring about calling a concept something vs discussing what something is already understood as a concept. There is a concept of what federation is, and that is represented in existing federated platforms like lemmy, matrix and so on. In that concept I see stupid things but it’s not all the same nor all of the concept stupid.
So storage on discussions.app is currently using open blockchains. So its the blockchain that is responsible for what is there, while they are only using that for text, blockchains have had childporn put on them. It is next to impossible to remove data from a blockchain. So that is an issue. I think the data would be better stored in something like ipfs. This type of platform relies on the backend for its distributedness, like with a blockchain. Anyone who can access the backend can be part of the platform.
Yes the blacklists would result in a federation of sorts. I think the idea you store and distribute mainly content you use is a good one. The data has to be somewhat unfiltered for the model to work and in that part you will potentially be distributing content you may not want to. Though the situation would be some what a kin to putting encrypted content say here that people wouldn’t like except for the fact they cant know that.
or Matrix could just solve p2p really well. The matrix.org situation has been mentioned by the p2p dev as motivation for p2p. The side benefit is matrix p2p solutions should work for other projects.
Everyone who disagrees with the rules can talk to the admins, they’re humans. if you don’t agree with it, leave and find an instance that fits you. you’d still be able to access content all around fediverse.
Are you saying content censored in one instance still persists on others here?
I think the admin model can be done much better.
Its a difficult concept to get, one because it has yet to really exist in any meaningful way, like with a platform with say 50k or more users and because of the terminology used. Moderation is a bad describer of it except it has much the same use and effect but with differences. It would be better described as ‘filters’. Filters would also be a good describer for what are block and white lists.
I dont particularly care on classifications, its just like different languages to me. To use your list its all 3, the instance can implement a central control but uses can switch instance and have the same content, or the instance may allow their control to be altered, like disabled or changed. Users can use lists made by others, to which they may as well help in making and users may also have their own lists. The concept should expand to include multiple lists block and white working against each other in priorities, and the lists work against not just users but any individual piece of content and it could and should I think be expanded to include editorial changes, annotations. Things like rather than hiding content pointing out problems with it, grassroots factchecking etc. To me its an incredibly adaptive and dynamic concept, which must be hard to implement or surely someone whould have tried long ago.
what is the power of the mods?
Currently on discussions.app content and users can only be hidden, the instance or interface has some moderators as fixed defaults for doing this but previously and the same I am told will occur soon is logged in users may unselect any of these moderators or add their own, and currently you can do your own moderation. Moderators can also be in control of a community and so using that community will use that moderation. The idea is all moderation is done on a consensual basis with each user, the platform then becomes individualized for each user. Rather than looking for instances you will just look for the communities and more so in the future the moderators. The simplest way would be you grow a follow list similar to your moderator list, but hopefully those lists become tradable at some point.
TLDR
Sorry for the long text. In short user controlled and collaborated and sharable filter lists is what I am talking about.
irrelevant metric? that’s an interesting reality you have going there, watch you don’t step outside cause it might break. You give no proof to your claims unlike I did. Looking at the list many of the unticked features have already been implemented. I could go through one by one with proof but won’t bother as you clearly have not either.
exactly, and the company behind element already surprisingly seems quite financially successful so I doubt this much money will change things massively.
NEW VECTOR LIMITED is located in LONDON, United Kingdom and is part of the Computer Systems Design and Related Services Industry. NEW VECTOR LIMITED has 16 employees at this location and generates $5.18 million in sales (USD). (Employees figure is estimated, Sales figure is modelled).
This is also all with the support of the core people behind matrix and element, so if anything was nefarious it would be stuffed either way as the team would be corrupt.
https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/27/element-raises-30-m-to-boost-matrix
Money is good as a function of our economy, but the issue you point out is concerning. It really depends on the conditions attached to the funding, like will it compromise the project somehow. The funding is just as likely to be from an intelligence agencies VC arm to alter the code for their benefit. I have seen mentions that Matrix is being used now in things that “can’t” be mentioned. Ideally open source should be able to circumvent such interference but not easily I think.
Moderators are globally set just on that one instance (or really it’s an interface or frontend), but also changeable by the users but also depending how the instance is setup. The way they are doing the data it is all shared in blockchains so in that sense it is a blob, but depending on each user and how they have that content curated would change the interactions user to user. In theory you will have groups oblivious to other groups but users within them that cross over between and become social bridges. The network is the people. My idea is that these human bridges will eventually lower barriers between users blocking each other and change minds. The end result is a more connected less divided social platform and so too society. Following the axiom that communication solves all problems. By putting the barriers to communication into the users hands instead of third parties he will have control to remove them.
Yes matrix’s new slim dendrite server is being worked on with the intention for it to be used in p2p. I get there is many possible implementations of federation and I am totally down to take on ‘big tech’ it’s just to do that I think you not only need to match them but bring something better and I am not entirely seeing that yet. In fact I am even seeing subpar things like discoverablity, fragmentation, performance, complications like to all the rules and instances.
Good points you make, whitelisting is powerful that way making closed communities. I wonder if lemmy will ever have encrypted communities?
Funny I just watched you make 2 edits while I was reading which impressed me with lemmy’s update speed. Its making matrix look slow.
Yes use case is important I think adding features and choice and letting users work it out is a good path. Something good would be serverless communities, matrix needs that for some rooms especially with p2p.
I still remember when ebay bought gumtree cause it was encroaching on its business, they then made gumtree a very hard place to use and it has since never recovered. Things like the automatic delisting after a short time mean you can never find or sell rare things anymore. Ebay really is evil like most big tech.
Selling things could easily form a part of lemmy or any social platform. But you need lots of users
Aren’t there blocklists in many p2p networks? I know in bittorrent there are.
Block lists with torrents were used to try prevent legal implication and a few other reasons all which are largely useless because peers on blocklists can just move to nonblocked ips, especially peers with resources looking to gather evidence.
My point is that it’s not federation what’s the cause of the “fiefdom” syndrome
I disagree but it is a point worth exploring. Thinking what would be the cause likely is that the federated instances exert control over the content rather than just storing and relaying it to the users to deal with.
In theory you could have the same problem in p2p network if a majority of peer nodes applied whitelisting.
Yes you could but it still depends how the content is distributed, peers on the white list could act as relays to those not on the white list. This would risk them being removed but when dealing with so many peers I just dont see lists like that working to segment the network too much. They may as well fork. The desire to remain connected to the larger network will be too much for most users. You could also have underlying blockchains or hash tables that make forking the network not very promising.
When hosting publicly you become responsible of the content
Section 230 and the dmca should still apply, enforcing becomes much harder with p2p but so does defending I think the legal system does make having free speech an interesting problem inspite that the constitution says it should be possible. I think having speech government and companies and many others don’t want is part of the plan for these networks. There is a great many authorities not happy at the freedoms the internet has allowed.
Torrents have problems when there’s not enough peers, there’s a lot of dead torrents out there showing this.
Yes but I think keeping the text part of these platforms alive should be much easier. Torrent only needs 1 peer(seed) with a full copy, a social network can easily have 50000 users which is a lot of resistance and redundancy.
Communities are already some kind of federation.
This is an excellent interpretation. On federated platforms there is federations inside federations. Its superfluous really, but it gets worse where communities get repeated.
Ok but nobody has the power to enforce the rules right? How do you deal with trolling and spamming? Does every user have to block every troll one by one?
Well it could depend on what you mean by enforce. There is moderators and they can enforce rules, it’s just each user is put kind of in an admin position to pick and choose the moderators. You can also have groups of moderators controlled by other users for any user to use, which is some part of how discussions.app is doing their ‘communities’ the other part is each community chooses what #tagged content to use. Aswell the instance could enforce certain moderators and infact some moderators must be set as default to keep the platform clean. The idea is these could be changed individually or with lists of moderators, or users just live inside the curated communities. The other thing is different instances could do it differently with a different set of default moderators.
The whole point of this type of platform/moderation is to solve problems seen on others. You won’t be able to own a topic or community ‘as such’ as users must consent for you to have power. The reality is people are lazy, stupid and will consent to crazy thing as seen from the last year. So because moderators provide a service stopping spam and abusive behavior then people will use them and they will have power. What this really prevents is moderators being bad actors and also people not having good moderation or situations with no moderation when its needed. Because anyone can moderate there should be a much higher supply of moderation and types of moderation. The types of moderation I think is where things can get interesting because there is a heap of behaviours that could be hidden and platforms would be much nicer places, but really it’s up to the users what they want and how they experience things.
I literally know nothing about it! Yet to read on it, so without any insite I cant discuss it. If you are talking about custom feeds then yes thats the future. On discussions.app they are doing their ‘communities’ as really custom curated feeds. Anyone is free to make a feed and curate it how they want with others, anyone can use any feed (community).
Note that I don’t know about the details on how comments/mentions between instances A and C are perceived by instance B.
So I am wondering that too. How does content interacted with on A by C affect B. I know how B would want that which is not to see it. To me all these server to server rules are not ideal and should instead be the users themselves organizing on the platform setting the rules. I know you have that with each community but I am talking also platform wide. The instance does that with its blocks but thats very authoritaian and lacks nuance.
Can you say more about how content moderation and codes of conduct work on a p2p network?
I know how I would do it and how matrix is planning to do it. Matrix is planning to keep it the same as rooms currently do it which is the same as communities here. Server based blocking becomes quite pointless in p2p I think which leaves me wondering how matrix will handle spam as their current main method is to block servers. In p2p you can potentially have new servers continually appear and attack you so…
I would use a moderation approach as like discussions.app is trying but that also really needs to also use how they organize content. The advantage is the approach is grassroots and nuanced with everyone getting the most unique moderation you could expect outside say some wonder ai doing it personally for everyone.
Yes email is an interesting point, but aren’t many mail servers blocked for spam? or many automatically filtered into trash for spam? Mind you so many run their own domains for companies it cant be possible that only a few domains are whitelisted? I am not sure how gmail and others go about blocking for spam but it would have to have a reporting theshold type situation.
I think as federation expands feifdom should be less of an issue but then look at the split in mastodon with gab.
The other thing to think about email is it is user to user messaging, private with laws protecting it. I am not concerned with being blocked or censored in the modern messaging platforms for this because they use e2ee and cannot discern any of the communications. You are still at the mercy of the network you are on and hence p2p helps with that, depending on hardware how much though. Wouldn’t it be great if we could use the cell hardware in phones to mesh? Thats nuclear world ended or revolution type tech.
I think matrix p2p will have to take a multi type node approach, with them beginning the existing home servers will just act as peers but imagine more will have to be done. Yes propogation will be slow but the tech is quite new so will have to see where it can go. I imagine nodes can adapt or be set to provide more based on resources available much like torrents can. Like a hydrid approach but more dynamic.
You are correct I need to spend more time here.
Realistically most people are not going to run an instance . Blocking does become a problem when you dont run an instance because most do some blocking or are blocked. Even if you run an instance at some point for any reason it could also be blocked.
Yes my rant is not solely targeted at lemmy put mainly Matrix because that is what I use. I should probably look more at mastodon and some others too. Federation has a lot of spins on the technology.
Its nice that you still get involved with users here, the matrix devs are also quite easy talk to. Have you considered how lemmy might intergate with other federations? I did mention in another post someone was developing forums on matrix. Hummingbard I think its called. I have wondered if chat and forum could be combined in an interesting way, such that they could both possibly flow together but be seperated by alternate uis or view modes. On matrix often discussions can take a forum type format and style with conversations having days or many hours between replies. It would be great if those could end up in more permanent threads.
It may be worth reaching out to matrix and element and seeing if some crossover can occur or even intergration. Their $30million and german health sector selection is a lot of potential dev work to be done.
Thanks nutomic!
Thanks for your well written reply
The Matrix p2p project is not even alpha. You should join the p2p room @matrix.org if you have some curiousity. Problems like storing distributing the data are not fully solved. I think you will have a mix of devices including heavier servers. They are trying to integrate each device as another home server but thats not ideal I think.
I do think p2p can be done and for forum type platforms. These are just not solved problems because as is said among dencentralizers centralization is easy! federation seems a natural stepping stone to p2p, after all instances or servers are really peers or nodes themselves it’s just when you push out to lowerpower devices and so many of them things become a bit different. I surpose that is why the Matrix’s p2p dev Neil is working on the server now.
I think p2p will need content to be distributed among nodes. I am looking forward to ipfs intergration on matrix as the media performance is horrible.
Note that there’s another solution allowed by the following property: an instance can be federated with two instances who are not federated with each other. Concretely, this means that you can create an instance who both has a CoC for its own content strict enough to federate with safe space ones, and federates with instances who have a less strict CoC to access their content.
You have lost me a bit on this. So are you saying one of the duplicate instances acts like a filter to interact with the other safe spaces instances?
If that is the case this is the beginnings of what can just naturally exist on discussions.app
Sorry Honestly I thought it may not search or you could explain it more. I will look into it more https://misskey.io/docs/stream
So if an admin deletes a post that originated on their instance that post will still exist on other instances? what about in communities?