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nostupidquestions No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
justdoit @lemm.ee

Don't federated instances just exacerbate already existing problems with places like Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter? Specifically admin/mod abuse, excessive reposting/cross-posting, server lag/issues?

So considering there’s a substantial push to get away from places like Reddit and Twitter, as an outsider I’m wondering how the fediverse is going to actually provide solutions to some already bad problems within higher resource platforms:

ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?

REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?

PRIVACY: I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?

SERVER ISSUES: This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases. Communicating across more and more instances is going to be extremely taxing. Access issues/desyncs seem like they’ll be inevitable. Doesn’t a federated system have more trouble scaling up than a centralized one because of this? How could small independently run servers keep up with exponential processing costs? Won’t this just squeeze out smaller instances? Add this to issues when instances choose to defederate, and you have two competing incentives: spreading out users to keep server stress low, and centralizing users to keep local engagement high. Isn’t this kind of a big hurdle?

Sorry for the wall of text- excited about lemmy in general but really have no idea about whether these are issues.

38 comments

  • at least with Lemmy, if you’re dealing with a bad admin or mod, you can move to a new instance …

  • ADMIN/MOD ABUSE: Redditors are no strangers to mods/admins nuking comments, astroturfing, signal boosting/silencing, and so on. Doesn’t that problem just become worse in a federated system? As an example, a subreddit mod may ban users for whatever reason, but a lemmy instance admin could drag all their communities into their own drama if they choose to defederate, no? Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw. Am I missing something?

    Yes and no. There are certainly concerns with "little dictators" hosting instances or individuals with an agenda manipulating content on their instance. The difference to a site like reddit or twitter is that this power and influence stops at the instance border, nobody controls lemmy, so people can always migrate to another instance if something like this happens.

    And with reddit, admins don't just control individual subreddits. There are of course admins that control all of reddit.

    REPOSTING/X-POSTING: Reddit was already just the same tweets posted to like forty different subreddits, recycled weekly. On lemmy, there are now a handful of instances that contain virtually the same communities too. The lemmy.world/c/memes and lemm.ee/c/memes communities will post virtually the same content. And that’s just one. Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?

    This is just an normal characteristic of decentralized services in general and I think it will resolve itself over time. There are of course also many different websites that host similar content and there are similar subreddits that host similar content. Over time, one will establish itself and become the main community.

    I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?

    Information tends to be more transparent and open on the fediverse. Stuff you post on lemmy is not private. Your personal information you provide when signing-up is of course readable by the person who hosts the instance or people who have admin access. However, at the moment at least, lemmy instances are not run for profit and don't use/sell your data for profit.

    There are privacy concerns, there are always privacy concerns. It's important to teach users how to protect themselvs by consciously controlling what information they reveal about themselves. This is much more important and effective than trying to control what others might do with your information.

    This kinda goes without saying, but a small instance will already struggle to host even their own local users as traffic increases.

    Here I have to speculate because I just don't know enough about the technical side of it. At the moment, most issues seem to be cause by software bugs, not by too much traffic or hardware performance.

    Handling high amounts of traffic and activity is always tricky. I believe scalability will probably be an issue that will arise, maybe sooner than later, but I don't think it's an unsolvable issue.

    • Here I have to speculate because I just don’t know enough about the technical side of it. At the moment, most issues seem to be cause by software bugs, not by too much traffic or hardware performance.

      Handling high amounts of traffic and activity is always tricky. I believe scalability will probably be an issue that will arise, maybe sooner than later, but I don’t think it’s an unsolvable issue.

      I'm running a small instance with around 55 communities/magazines. But, running on kbin. I'm currently getting an average of 5 federation messages a second, of course most of them are like notifications. The LA on the server is 1.55 1.35 1.05 right now, that's with a 16 thread cpu, and the server is also doing a lot of other things. At the current level of traffic, the load of federation at least is negligible.

      I only have myself as a user right now though, because for whatever reason my instance doesn't show up in fedidb unless you actually search for it. But it's not in any of the lists they publish of instances they are blocking or hiding.

  • Overall answer: too early to tell, but we can observe some things.

    1. admin/mod abuse, maybe. If the bigger instances get too censorship-happy, smaller ones have to follow along or get defederated.
    2. Reposting/x-posting, yes, we see this, even when not intentional. Not mentioned: fragmentation of communities across multiple instances. There was a good post about this earlier.
    3. Privacy: yes this is an issue, but mostly less bad than centralized corporate sites like Reddit. I would prefer a self-hosted instance to deal with this, and might put one up sometime.
    4. Server lag: this is an observable problem but I think it is because the current versions of the software are inefficient and/or trying to do too much. The amount of traffic is not that large. NNTP servers 30 years ago carried far more traffic than all the Lemmy instances put together, on computers 1/1000th of the speed and capacity of the bigger Lemmy servers. They were not on the web though (there was no web then). They basically only implemented the equivalent of the API, and let client apps handle the user interface. So they didn't manage subscriptions, upvotes, downvotes, block lists, etc. They just copied messages around. But as a longtime user of that system, I can tell you it was great until trolls and spammers ruined it.

  • Note: what I'm going to say represents my personal beliefs, based on some reasoning. Take it with a grain of salt.

    Doesn’t that problem [admin/mod abuse] just become worse in a federated system?

    Admins: no, because the admins of any given instance have less power over the whole than the admins of a centralised system, and it's considerably easier to mass migrate across instances than from a centralised site to another.

    For a practical example: imagine that your instance admin goes rogue and says "fuck the users, I want profit". Now imagine that the admins of a centralised site do the same.

    Mods: the federation itself has a smaller impact on mods than on admins, but it gives them less room for power abuse. Since each instance is smaller, the admins of said instance are more likely to intervene if some of their mods go rogue. And you'll also see more communities around the same topic around instances, so people don't concentrate so much on the same comms as you'd see Reddit users gathering into a single subreddit.

    Also note that, while unrelated to the federation itself, Lemmy has built-in transparency tools like mod log. It's harder to be a shitty mod here and get away with it.

    Losing access to entire instances instead of just one community/subreddit based on a power-tripping admin seems a big flaw.

    It's a fucking big annoyance, but it's a feature, not a flaw. Sometimes the simple threat of defederation forces admins to act (that's actually good).

    And, if instance A defederates instance B, members of the instance A lose access to the content of the instance B, and nothing else. (Until they set up alt accounts in instance B to work around it.)

    Aren’t feeds going to be overrun by duplicate posts in /All?

    So far I don't think that this is a bigger or smaller issue than in Reddit.

    I have no clue about this… are there extra security or privacy issues with something like lemmy?

    You could argue that privacy is a bigger concern here, indeed, as anything that you post in one instance is hosted in other instances. However, given the nature of social media, you should be already posting with an "anything that I post here is publically available" mindset, be it here or in Twitter or Reddit or Facebook or any other place.

    Server issues

    I'm ignorant on the technical side of the things, so I won't voice my take on this.

  • The issue will come if your beloved communities are in different instances defederated from each other. You will have to move to a instance were those are not defederated. So it’s crucial to have the option to migrate our user easily through instances. I read its feature that’s coming . At some point it is the best solution to be decentralized in a difficult scenario as a social link aggregator and discussion platform. I’m mostly worried about the actual data and content that will be wiped if a instance dies because the admin decides to delete it all. There should be a a protection on that. My other concern is privacy too, it’s pretty easy to track users activity from inside and outside. On this point is our responsibility to take measures and take care of our IPs and emails which are the two points any entity Can point to our real identity. For this, VPN and email aliases. I see the whole thing very hard to use for those internet users that don’t want to bother and just scroll . But at some point that would split the waters between poor and rich quality of users.

    • If a community you like gets defederated from your home instance you can also create an account on the communitie's instance instead of migrating your old account to an instance that federates with exactly what you are looking for.

38 comments