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Comment on Why are peole hating on .world?

OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

At a wild guess, it could literally be the communism?

No really, I’m serious: what you are describing sounds to me like there is a sense of “ownership”, as in an instance owns a community, whereupon everything else is lesser than the owner with respect to that particular content - e.g. the others “mirror” the content that is “owned” by the instance that the community is on. A master/slave relationship, in computer science terminology.

In contrast, ActivityPub sounds to me (caveat: I’ve never read the source) like everyone is equal, hence why every action is shared equally by all. A distributed burden. Except without the major traditional benefits of it being distributed - i.e. Aussie.Zone cannot simply connect to some other server instance with less physical distance between it and Lemmy.World, no it must go straight to the source, even when that results in a 7-day delay (and even that cutoff is only because things older than that simply get deleted).

On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping someone from not respecting the deletion requests, and instead highlighting that content, in the current Lemmy framework. It would definitely be a deviation from the standard codebase though. And therefore every time there’s an update or patch, there would have to be a merge event to keep that feature functional.

I wonder if the reason your idea is not done is bc it relies too much on “trusting” the client for security reasons? Although… tbf I’m not certain how much that would differ from how things are now.

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lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m not sure if the analogy with communism holds well, as communism implies post-scarcity. Perhaps socialism - if you see the current AP protocol as the Soviet economy from 1918 to 22, my proposal is basically a Lenin style New Economic Policy: a step back (less federation) to take two steps forward later (federation growth).

As for the mirrors, secondary (as in backup) would be a good analogy; their main reason to exist would be to make admins+mods accountable. (“Why did you remove [content]? It’s within the rules, even if you disagree with it!”). And ideally it should be possible for a single mirror to work for multiple instances, specially smaller ones. In the meantime, the actual (non-mirror) instances would be on equal grounds.

In contrast, ActivityPub […]

As far as I know, as someone who didn’t read the source either, that’s accurate. aussie.zone is basically mirroring the content of federated instances, to service its users, then when some aussie.zone user posts something there the other instances mirror it.

On the other hand, there’s nothing stopping someone from not respecting the deletion requests, and instead highlighting that content, in the current Lemmy framework. It would definitely be a deviation from the standard codebase though. And therefore every time there’s an update or patch, there would have to be a merge event to keep that feature functional.

In theory, there isn’t. In practice:

AFAIK this is not something that Lemmy or Mastodon were coded for. It’s unsupported so the person doing it would need to maintain their own fork of the relevant software.

This becomes specially problematic once users from the non-deleting instance interact with content that, for other instances, has been deleted.

I wonder if the reason your idea is not done is bc it relies too much on “trusting” the client for security reasons? Although… tbf I’m not certain how much that would differ from how things are now.

If I had to take a guess, the reason why W3C, Lemmer-Webber and Prodromou created the AP the current way is because, while you’re raising a baby, you never know the growing pains that it’ll have as a teen.
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- OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Awwww, we’re growing up!?:-) So even if the Fediverse eventually (in let’s say a decade or two hence) becomes merely an example of what not to do, still we are in on the ground floor as we all go through these growing pains, together:-).
  
  And we must be doing something right. Or perhaps it’s that there merely aren’t any other good options. But this is where the people who are good to talk with are, currently. Like you:-D.
  
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  - lvxferre@mander.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yup, we are growing. It isn’t just in number of users, or their activity here, but also in the number of platforms using the protocol - and that’s one of the things that the ActivityPub developers did really right: they picked the concept of federation from earlier protocols/standards (like OStatus), and made it usable for more than just microblogging. The impact of that is twofold:
    
    future-proofing the protocol. Even if microblogging were to fade away, as a trend, the protocol would still survive.
    
    older platforms push new ones up, even if the new ones are something completely novel.
    
    (I also like chatting with you!)
    
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    OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That’s a good perspective. Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks are all now implementing the ActivityPub protocol as well as Lemmy, meaning that even if “Lemmy” were to go away or fall behind or sth, the Fediverse overall would remain (as you said, and I am agreeing:-).
    
    And entire new categories of things too - like I think that something as central as wikipedia shouldn’t be federated (Russia, China, and North Korea would all have their “set of facts”, separately from what the Western world uses, and e.g. Taiwan would be banned from using the latter and thereby forced to use the former, etc.), but for more niche concepts like individual video games or movie fandoms that’s a great idea, so that just one single point of failure does not cause loss of all content.:-)
    
    (and unfortunately as we see with the Internet Archive getting attacked recently, that aspect is revealed to be of greater importance than I think most people give it credit for - it’s not easy to keep something up-to-date, particularly with “recent” edits, and ActivityPub as we see does so upon literally every single change, whether you wanted it to or not!?:-P)
    
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