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.
Note: what I’m going to say represents my personal beliefs, based on some reasoning. Take it with a grain of salt.
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.
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.)
So far I don’t think that this is a bigger or smaller issue than in Reddit.
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.
I’m ignorant on the technical side of the things, so I won’t voice my take on this.