so right now im having some pretty major annoyances with how federation is implemented by lemmy as a whole. defed makes it so you cant see whole threads, so looking at AMAs on lemmy.ml from hexbear are essentially useless unless you are viewing the main post, same with technical questions. which means lemmy cant replace reddit for a wide variety of uses. what i guess im asking is, can this be fixed, or is it innate to activitypub?
this is gonna be a huge problem as more and more instances are made. you could see someone make a question post but then you could create duplicate answers, wasting many people's time completely because you cant see each other. its also annoying as fuck that if i enjoy the community here, i have to keep making more and more accounts to access the fediverse as it inevitably becomes more fragmented. so in order to make sure that everyone sees everything youd have to keep creating accounts which is completely antithetical to the idea of the fediverse.
like i'd be ok with not being able to reply to certain instances, or choosing to block instances myself, but having that decision made for me is extremely lame. like if im in some instance talking about star trek or some shit, WHY does it fucking matter that im on a wrongthink instance so certain users cant see or reply to each others shit???
I think it's because there's no canonical view of the posts/comments on an instance. you either get them from the server originating the user or you don't. the view on the main thread on the instance it was posted on is the view from that instance. that is, the comments on a thread are compiled on an instance based on what it receives from federated instances. I'm guessing the main server hosting a thread doesn't actually host the comments from federated instances, it just receives them as federated comments attached to a particular post.
seems like a critical error for the fediverse, makes it completely useless for mainstream use
I think it's just a limitation of federation. if another email server blocks emails from a particular domain, you're not gonna be able to see mail from that domain from your client either.
yeah, it just seems shortsighted, there needs to be some sort of 'view only' mode at least, which i feel can be achieved by querying a website and pulling all its comments. the nature of social media is communities tend to fracture and split off due to disagreements. without a unifying structure, question threads, which are a sizable portion of the internet, are 100% useless if any one instance is partially federated.
yeah, the way instancing works with social media is kind of new. instead of big infrastructure providers supplying the instances, we have small, community grown instances that feud with each other because of personality/politics conflict. maybe what needs to happen is that all the comments on a post should be forwarded from the main instance hosting a post, and instances should just make their own choice on whether to display them or not. idk.
idk, to me, if you hate a community, just block it yourself on the user level.
like is there not a way to just ban defederating and introduce blocklists at the user level?
like hexbear isn't federating with the whole fediverse atm either, and doing so was fairly unpopular when we took a poll. there's also like the nazi instances. if federating meant federating with them, we'd be subjecting everyone on hexbear to their shit until they personally took the time to block those communities. and the nazis would be able to spam us by creating new communities people hadn't blocked yet.
Yeah but if they had block lists that you could subscribe to that'd fix it
That’s kinda the same as making an account on an instance which has instance-level white/blacklists. Though I guess the difference is that others can immediately identify and potentially block that account, because it belongs to that instance.
Probably what will end up happening is there ends up being a few generic instances (analogs to gmail.com, icloud.com) which will host anyone who follows some basic TOS. Then it would be very hard for any small instance to block the generic instances.
That, or users are encouraged to create their own private instances and control their federation that way.
I think the fix that's less of a headache for everyone is just to have the server send all comments, federated or otherwise, associated with a post to the servers federating with it. then we can have our own discussion under a beehaw comment and beehaw can filter out our replies/not display them. ofc, this still means we'd see comments from nazis, but at least there'd be multiple groups of moderators cleaning those comments out.
I'm hoping they implement something like this, where users can block instances if they want, and admins re-federate and let users choose what they want to see
Agree, leave the decision to the user. Otherwise, there's no way to keep track of who is defederating whom.
I think Mastodon's federation is a little bit better. On Lemmy, instance admins can choose to either federate or not federate. While on Mastodon, you can federate, limit, and suspend (equivalent to defederating/blocking). Limiting an instance makes it invisible to the general user of the server limiting it, but you can still follow individual accounts. However, I would say federation is still very clunky on both websites and is being improved far too slowly.
I personally am in support of changing it to having different levels of defederation. I don't mind that beehaw wouldn't want our posts or comments on their instance's comms directly, but it's extremely annoying having to make sure I'm replying to a comment from an instance that doesn't defed lemmygrad
I can't even see all comments on lemmygrad threads from hexbear, even though I'm pretty sure we're as federated with them as possible because they're the only other people who aren't libs.
If I could at least log in on lemmygrad with my hexbear account then that would be more usable.
Or if the instance hosting the thread had final say on what's shown or not, regardless of the inter-site politics of who's federated with whom.
Or if the instance hosting the thread had final say on what's shown or not, regardless of the inter-site politics of who's federated with whom.
This seems like the obvious answer, and much simpler than how it actually works so I’m not sure why they didn’t do that in the first place. Whatever instance a thread is on controls it, that’s it.
Yeah this is in part why I host my own instance. I'm able to essentially sidestep the defederation drama entirely.
But you're not wrong, there's inherently a problem with how federation works. The intention is to decentralize, but this breaks down when users gravitate towards one or two massive instances. Ideally everyone would use small/medium sized instances preventing any 1 instance from getting too large and therefore centralizing the fediverse.
It works for microblogging, but I think large "general" lemmy instances have too much power for it to work well here.
Im hoping they implement some kind of system where users can block whole instances, then admins can hopefully leave it up to users to defederate as they see fit
