why yes i want my totally independent website to join network of dozens of shittier websites so that we can aggregate the content from my website into a shitty reddit clone and have the entire site shut down because one unpaid moderator decided to cut a single string and block half the sites from even working.
yes i dont understand how it works, do you? does anyone understand what the fuck even happened?
Nah the whole lemmyverse is like 50k people no one is going to rememebr this.
Also it's not a big deal. It's opt-in, afaik nothing will change if you don't opt in.
THIS IS THE WORST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED ON THE INTERNET!
versus
Hits the Local filter button
I don't really think about it at all.
Local is default, for most of my lemmygrad existence I didn't even know we were federated and could see other posts.
Wouldn't comments on local posts from non-local users still show up? We'd still have to be subjected to a barrage of libs calling us tankies.
Don't you remember when Chapotraphouse would summon libs for bullying?
At some point, someone's gotta code a lemmy nword count bot.
you know how emails talk to each other even when hosted by different providers?
its like that
Some of the most popular services we use everyday are federated. E-mail being one of the biggest. Federated VOIP and XMPP are some others.
Just because it's implemted poorly on some Reddit clones, it doesn't mean it's useless
okay sure but can you name 1 federated service that wasnt a mistake
Unlike NFTs or cryptocurrency, federation is based on the ActivityPub open standard, authored by W3C, which is where a lot of important Internet standards come from (founded and still lead by Tim Berners-Lee).
Maybe Lemmy won't be remembered, but if not, some other implementation of ActivityPub probably will be.
I dislike how much technical know-how and open source enthusiasm has been absorbed by the quest to federate everything. But it's not a bad feature, now that they've sunk all that work into it.
Unfortunately, what the internet really needs is either technically boring (forums/etc that are easy to deploy, foolproof, and require no skills to admin), or purely social (sustainably funded cooperatively owned development of critical infrastructure). I's sort of inevitable that a technically exciting solution that's at least adjacent to the social problems would win out.
But federation is here and it's probably an improvement, so we might as well take advantage of it, even if it isn't what I would've prioritized if I was crowned Dictator Of Open Source.
Unfortunately, what the internet really needs is either technically boring (forums/etc that are easy to deploy, foolproof, and require no skills to admin)
We took so many steps backwards when we moved from forums to Reddit.
Federating won't be even remotely a big enough phenomenon to have that amount of cultural impact.
The same is true for XMPP chat, SIP voip, and DNS servers. Individual people just don't do it unless they are operating a homelab to build skills, are curious, or a total nerd. It's not difficult or expensive (can do it for free, software is turnkey), the average person just doesn't do it because they already have a managed provider and are satisfied enough that they have no reason to even look into if they can do it themselves.
I'm sure ActivityPub will end up exactly the same, widespread and part of the internet backbone but something most people never think about hosting themselves regardless of how easy it is to do.
Have you tried this? It takes forever for your server to be trusted, if you roll your own email expect to be marked as spam for those big providers, which is used by a big majority of people and services
Have you tried this?
Yes. I have done it for well over twenty years. Other than a couple personal email accounts, I host a few accounts that my homelab machines use to send alerts or password resets for friends and family who use services I host. As long as my email servers are properly configured to use all the current best practices I have never had issues with them sending emails to Gmail, Outlook, etc.
It takes forever for your server to be trusted, if you roll your own email expect to be marked as spam
edit: I was listing off all the steps to make sure your server won't get rejected, stuff like checking to see if the IP address or url you are using has been flagged on public registries as having been used for malware or spam in the past, making sure you have a real SSL cert signed by an authority... it made me realize that hosting your own email server might be more hassle than most people are willing to go through. I still stand behind my assertion that you are wrong that it's due to a couple big email providers centralizing but will admit that at this point in the internets history it is more hassle than most people are willing to put up with due to all the safeguards now in place. It doesn't mean the average person can't but that due to decades of malicious actors there is a lot less blind trust, which means today there are additional steps to make sure other servers trust your server. This isn't because of Google or Microsoft but for the usual reasons "we can't have nice things".
Email in particular is a complete fuck to self-host, but this is mostly because it is a 40 year old standard with dozens of layers of sediment, regolith and fossils buried on top. I do it for matapacos.dog, and while I use a "turnkey" solution (MailInABox) it still requires a lot of preparation and understanding of various anti-spam measures.
Modern platforms arena lot easier to set up.
I could be wrong on the exact meaning of "federation" here, but I'm pretty sure it has been around forever on the internet in the form of email and other things.
yes i dont understand how it works, do you? does anyone understand what the fuck even happened?
ShowIt took us 30 years for the internet to bring us back to FIDOnet.
While it very well might not be a successful strategy it is pretty shitty to compare it to capitalist land grabs.
ive seen their bullshit i dont want any cross contamination with it
and 
