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.
Overall answer: too early to tell, but we can observe some things.
admin/mod abuse, maybe. If the bigger instances get too censorship-happy, smaller ones have to follow along or get defederated.
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.
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.
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.