Naive Bright Eye Dev: Let’s create a decentralized anonymous platform for people to share their ideas without censorship. They’ll all be progressive and have the same politics like me.

Users: Ideas reflect society’s sentiment on issues due to a fractured left and strong neoliberal class.

Naive Dev: Pikachu Face.

Some Fractured Left Guy: oh this growth is bad, my dream is “Dying” A ta ta ta.

If only there was a way to run your own server with your own rules and exclude those nodes you don’t like or something. Damn decentralized platforms being so centralized and out of our control!

If there’s content you don’t like you can block it.

If the node you’re on didn’t have the same views as you, get a new node or make a new node.

I don’t agree with any kind of racism, but just stating things like this, like you have no control, is just whining. You at least have options with Mastodon.

Social networks are always going to be a mixed bag, be part of the solution, not someone that just complains about the problem.

I’ve been on fedi since 2017 and I largely agree with this post. Well the linked article, this post on lemmy oddly focuses on one small detail.

I think activitypub is a fine protocol, for what it is trying to do. I don’t know enough about the internals of the protocol to write up a list of improvements, but I reckon there’s some work that could be done to make federation a little bit more granular and to increase privacy and security. Some of that can be done at the application level, others need to be done at the protocol level.

As for mastodon specifically, there’s a lot going on there. Mastodon itself is hugely complicated. And it’s not even a native speaker of activitypub, having it added only later. So in some ways it had to bend activitypub to its will to keep working the way it had, and in some ways it had to absorb some complexity into it’s application to sort of graft on support for it.

A lot of long-lived software has problems like this. In some ways it’s unavoidable, in other ways it’s requires a very strong community with a well-aligned vision to take decisive action.

But the community doesn’t really have that aligned vision. Or rather there’s a disconnect between the community and project leadership. I haven’t ever interacted directly with any of the regular contributors so I don’t want to ascribe motives or personality traits to them.

But whatever the case or cases there’s a lot of people trying to address some of these fedi issues as far as personal safety tools, federated blocking, privacy and security tools, etc. But mastodon - perhaps as one of the more established fedi projects - is a little bit more conservative about pursuing or implementing some of these ideas.

Some of the issues, as one of the commenters on the post point out, is just that microblogging is an inherently unhealthy interaction pattern for a lot of people - especially when corporate platforms have trained users for so many years specifically to have those unhealthy interaction patterns.

But ultimately I believe fedi is worth saving and capable of being saved. But it’s going to require a strong community with a strong vision. Which may require a new generation of developers making a new generation of software.

Hopefully Lemmy can be a part of that.

There are thousands of Mastodon instances and some of them are full of gross people, who knew? There are tools in place to fight these problems like filtering, muting, blocking and defederating. My personal experience with Mastodon has been wonderful, how hard is it to understand that it’s all about the instance you pick? You can just join another if you don’t like the current one. Also I don’t care what kind if person lead dev is as long as he makes a good social network.

Problems this article describes aren’t the problems of the fediverse. They are problems of internet.

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