FOSSDLE PieFedThe Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves: Cohost and the Fate of Centralized Platforms
submitted by
Riley
audiovalentine.com/2024/09/the-beatings-will-co…
Honestly that's why email has stuck around. Can you imagine if one company controlled email? That would've enshittified and shut down years ago lol
last week i was in a conversation with a few people about social media. i guess they were finally leaving xitter and wanted to know where to go. cohost came up and they all made accounts immediately. then i mentioned mastodon and was immediately rebuffed because "sometimes those instances shut down"
whoops!
It's super easy to migrate accounts on Mastodon. Even works fine to move an account from Mastodon to Akkoma for example.
Your content stays behind, though, and some shut down without warning.
Content is mirrored on all federated instances and it is very rare for an instance to shut down without notice.
I meant that it's not directly associated with you as the owner through your migrated account.
Edited comment (many to some).
I don't think that's even desirable and also legally questionable. But anyways, these posts are not gone with an instance shutting down and thus I don't really see a problem. You can always add a link to a mirrow of those old posts in your profile.
This should hopefully get better over time as some instances stick around for longer. You'll be able to point to instances that have stuck around for a while, which means they'll probably stick around for some time longer. The problem right now is that the fediverse and many instances are still young, and something that started yesterday is not too likely to still exist tomorrow.
i just have such a hard time wrapling my head around why the fedi is under that level of scrutiny to begin with while everyone assumed cohost would be forever. i had an account there but stopped using it years ago because half the time i tried to log in it was down! come october there will be a plethora of mastodon instances that both predate and have outlived cohost
I agree with the overall spirit, but this is a bit shallow, no? Not much of an attempt to argue its points. It makes some claims, refuses to elaborate, then leaves. Feels written for people who already think the same.
Would decentralization have helped it make a much greater impact? Would it have helped Cohost survive? Seems to me that financial issues would've killed it regardless.
Well in theory if cohost was decentralized, the instance that is now shutting down would just be one of many. As it is, it's one of one, the only one.
Plenty of Lemmy instances have shut down, some less abruptly than others. One cohost instance shutting down is not that remarkable, all things considered. It's only remarkable cause there's just one instance.
In theory, I doubt development would continue. For a federated cohost to survive long term, it would also need to be open source, with a developer community that could fork the project and carry the torch. That's a very different cohost we're envisioning, even excluding required UX changes to make it possible.
At that point, one might as well imagine a cohost that explored better ways to make money, or attracted more users, or ran a tighter ship. Both scenarios lead to this discussion never happening.
I don't know what Cohost was but I'm pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn't click on the link because it says "audio" so I expected it to be audio and I didn't feel like listening to one. It's a written article though.
Why? The userbase is quite stable, and new platform are emerging (Piefed, Mbin), and more people are probably going to come the next time Reddit messes up
The instance system is confusing for new users and they might not even realize that they're missing out on a lot of content by signing up to the wrong instance.
In the end it's just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it and sure you can create your own instance but another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that's still a lot of power in the hands of a single person...
Both front and back end need to be decentralized and also separated from each other. Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
This way people sign up on one page and can use the same credentials no matter what page they go to, the competition for front end devs is to offer the best UI, the development for the hosting part is what's done as a community on GitHub or whatever...
I always point new users to Lemm.ee nowadays.
All of the top 20 instances ask feedback from their communities before defederating. They know that if they don't, people will switch instances in two clicks.
This isn't an absolute rule. Of course they don't (and shouldn't) ask for feedback before cutting off Nazi instances, but it's not always so clear.
.world defederated from fosstodon and I'm still unsure why.
Have you asked on !support@lemmy.world ? Could be spam issues too
Most people are not interested in moderating their own feed. Leading people to an instance that does very little moderation on the defederation side of things could push them away. In that situation, they are likely to just leave the fediverse altogether and less likely to go to another instance I would say. I respect lemm.ee as an instance but I would not recommend it as a "gateway drug" to the fediverse.
The issue is that - LW is too big - SJW has a non neutral name - Lemmy.ca advertised itself as Canadian - Feddit.org has a meta community in German
There is Lemmy.zip, but they are also very light on defederation. Lemmy.dbzer0 blocks lemmygrad but still federates with hexbear
Do you have any other suggestion?
Most people won't switch though, they won't want to lose their username, their feed and so on, we're creatures of habits...
Hell, trolls could go around and recreate accounts on the top 100 instances with the same username users have on other instances to prevent them from reusing the same username elsewhere, just that is a weird concept to explain "Oh yeah, someone else can create an account and pretend to be you and unless people notice that the instance they're from isn't the same, there's no way to know it isn't you!"
You're sending users to Lemmy.ee but in the end it's an instance controlled by one person paying the hosting fees and with the last word on what goes on on their server.
You can keep your username, export and import your subscriptions and block list in two clicks from the settings.
"You are bob@gmail.com, but someone could create bob@outlook.com and pretend to be you"
Also, this kind of impersonating would probably get the trolls banned.
Lemm.ee had 5 admins. The main one has been very clear that he keeps defederation to a minimum: https://lemm.ee/post/35472386?scrollToComments=true
Of course you need to trust him and his team.
If you prefer a paid model where you have a customer relationship with the admin, you might to have a look at https://communick.com/services/lemmy/
The owner is @rglullis@communick.news , who commented below
Yes but that doesn't mean you should get automatic dibs on a name everywhere. It's just a name. If you are Joe Bill at lemm.ee, that does not give you any rights over the name Joe Bill *all across the world*. Statistically speaking, there's at least 18 thousand other Joe Bills around at this very moment.
Like, this is something that is already solved by the instance's moderators.
The whole point of the fediverse is having a choice of admin. That democratizes the space because people can choose where to go. The point is not to rid yourself of admins entirely (or at least not without just becoming your own admin, but then there is still an admin, it's just yourself).
Sorry but the vast majority of users are not interested in curating their feed. Most people don't want to also be moderators. I mean fuck it's difficult to even recruit mods for even medium-sized communities. Most people don't like "absolute free speech" and want some level of moderation. Making all content available is not a path towards healthy platforms - it runs into the nazi bar problem instantaneously.
I won't even comment on the herculean technical challenge of doing it in the way you describe, but even if it was possible, I don't think it's actually desirable. It sounds good on the surface, but that's about it.
Communities would still have their moderators though, there just wouldn't be someone at the top that can decide that tomorrow you don't have access to the content from another instance anymore unless you switch to another instance yourself...
If there are no admins, who can ever decide who is a moderator? How do you decide that? The way it is currently decided is via admins granting mods powers on communities on that admin's instance. If you don't have admins, I don't see how you could possibly have mods.
The issues are describing are real, but can be solved with better clients.
Interesting read!
What you're describing sounds closer to how atproto is supposed to work, but it's yet unproven in regards to decentralization.