I know this is reposted to lemmy so people are understandably going to connect those dots but OOP was talking about cohost, a site very similar to tumblr. Many people (including myself) jumped ship from tumblr to cohost following a series transmisogynistic bans and censorship from tumblr’s staff. Cohost was run by 4 people, didn’t run ads and was funded entirely by the community. It was honestly the best social media platform I’ve ever used. Unfortunately it shut down in October 2024 due to lack of funding and developer burnout. In retrospect, OOP was right. The people I followed on cohost moved to discord servers or their own blogs, and while I didn’t engage much with my “community” on cohost while it was around, I lost a lot of what I used to see on there. I think lemmy and federated social media is more resistant to that because it’s spread across so many instances, but I think OOP has a point, smaller social networks like this and cohost aren’t stable. While I think tumblr and twitter are pretty horrible for many reasons and I don’t wish to go back, I can’t really blame OOP for their sentiments. Maybe one day we can have the best of both worlds.
I’ve reached a point where I’m much more likely to store my data with a random furry hacker hosting their service in Netherlands than a big tech corpo.
I will trust random furry hackers with my life.
What’s the link for the furry hacker hosting in the Netherlands? I guess it’s the influence of the fediverse, but this scenario does sound more trustworthy
Furries has made real, powerful, and constant efforts to purge fascists from their spaces.
In 2017, there was a massive push to remove the nazi furs from public spaces. As far as I’m aware, their numbers never recovered, and since then, community members have kept the effort going.
I haven’t looking into the community in a while, but I do remember a weirdly high number of people in furry documentaries and interviews having like SS bands and other nazi insignia. Glad they purged that.
Yeah, nazifurs, or Furry Raiders. They were banned a lot, everywhere. And then there was a whole thing where that right wing asshole Milo Yiannopolous was talking a big game about how he was going to go to a furry convention. So, he got pre-emptively banned from the event, and then he was online talking a big game about planning to show up… people were expecting violence… and he never did.
I know I’m not the only one who laughed and laughed. I really enjoy reading about lots of subcultures online, and whenever the furry drama pops up, it’s some of the most riveting.
oh I just mashed a few different people into one imaginary scenario. my Mastodon admin is a random Dutch guy (stux is the admin of mstdn.social, masto.ai, mastodon.coffee, gram.social and pixey.org), and I use some services on hostux.network (mostly their FreshRSS instance), a French hacker community. I used to store my Youtube subscriptions on several Invidious/Piped instances over the years, until I resorted to putting them in the RSS reader as well. my Matrix account is currently on the flagship instance, but since it’s big and slow, I’m considering moving to some smaller entity in the future.
Sounds like catbox.moe to me
Based
Hear hear!
This person is an imbecile, but they’re also a 20yo on Tumblr so of course they are
I mean isn’t the thing about the Fediverse that if your host instance gets entrenched in enshittification or financial ruin then you can just leapfrog from instance to instance and have all of your old posts still online and the content and userbase of one community can be migrated to another community on another server?
I’m hosting my own single user instance so I don’t have to worry about that. My instance will live as long as I’m paying the domain fee.
But what good is your own instance if there’s no content?
Dude saw this content. As did you. That is the power of federation.
You can subscribe to anything you want, on any instance.
Totally unproven dream of the fediverse*
Imo it’ll go like this. 50%+ of the users captured on a single instance. Basically lemmy.world already. It continues to scale until there’s millions of active users. Costs get too high and the offer of investment money is too good. The instance sells out. Non-federated killer features creep in ala embrace / extend / extinguish. Nobody else in the community can afford to run it at that scale, too much admin and servers. Data export is turned off. Users don’t know how to get their accounts working on a clone or that it exists. Most of them stay on the big instance due to network effect. We end up with a new BlueSky, Threads, or Reddit. The investors win again. A new revolution begins over again …
Imo we just enjoy it while it’s here & stay small
Imo it’ll go like this. 50%+ of the users captured on a single instance. Basically lemmy.world already.
l.w. barely has even 30% and most of the people doing outreach are suggesting other instances already.
It seems like it should be dead easy to just migrate people and communities to another instance in that case. I don’t think it’s a risk.
Please explain how then? (Hint: it’s not)
You make new communities on other instances and people sub to them?
All of that could happen and it still wouldn’t mean shit in a federated system. One instances gets big and turns to shit, so what?
That problem would have been solved with a dumb back-end and smart front-end both decentralized separately. Have the people in the back-end just providing storage space to store the data and back it up, let anyone develop a front-end to access the data. No more admins, just mods.
You start to run into issues around stuff like CP. who gets the power to delete it? Who’s liable for storing it (legally) if it cascades to all the storage instances? No one? Everyone? What happens when someone abuses that delete power to start to steer discussions in their politically preferred direction? Who has the authority to monitor and regulate removal of those abusers? What if they themselves are abusers? Who watches the watchmen?
It’s a simple technical solution, but as with all things in life, the shitbag humans are the problem.
Same as right now, hosts use tools to clean up their servers if they don’t want to host it. You don’t back up everything on all the servers, you can just make sure all data is backed up twice so if one server shuts down there’s two backups, so you wouldn’t end up with all servers hosting malicious data.
The delete power abuse is much more of an issue at the moment since admins have complete control over their instance, with what I’m suggesting they can delete messages they don’t like from their servers, it’s backed up on other servers.
It gives more control and responsibilities to users by eliminating the admins from the equation altogether. No more instances, no more admins to decide that you can’t see the content from instances they don’t like, manage your own feed as you have access to the whole database.
community (following and followers), yes. posts, not always. Mastodon migration doesn’t support migrating your posts at the moment, for example.
Doesnt seem like a very smart person.
I feel like those pushing the alternatives don’t understand that most people do not care. And them not caring means fewer people on the platform. And fewer people on the platform makes the ones that do care…care less.
I was happy to leave reddit for Lemmy despite the lack of overall content because the stuff I want to see is (mostly) here and it’s a solo endeavor. But discord…? I’m in a dozen servers with different groups of people, most of them don’t want to deal with new platforms. I’d be running a Matrix server (and dealing with it’s development wors) for a couple of people and discord for the rest…so what’s the point?
I’m not even a discord fanboy…I’d LOVE to switch. But the reality is that I’d be leaving most of my friends and acquaintances behind if I did.
Some people just want to have their cake and complain about it used to taste better but is also 1m closer to them than a different cake (that tastes exactly like the old one because it was made by the same bakers who made the first one who got let go during a “restructuring” period at the first cake’s dev firm)… , too.
being ran
\sigh
