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The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves: Cohost and the Fate of Centralized Platforms
(audiovalentine.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
102 points (97.2% liked)
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I don't know what Cohost was but I'm pessimistic about Lemmy these days. Note that the link is to an article moaning about the centralization of sites like Reddit and that Cohost (whatever that was) failed because it was run by the same type of people. At first I didn't click on the link because it says "audio" so I expected it to be audio and I didn't feel like listening to one. It's a written article though.
Why? The userbase is quite stable, and new platform are emerging (Piefed, Mbin), and more people are probably going to come the next time Reddit messes up
The instance system is confusing for new users and they might not even realize that they're missing out on a lot of content by signing up to the wrong instance.
In the end it's just a bunch of centralized websites sharing content if the admins feel like it and sure you can create your own instance but another admin can decide to defederated from yours anytime they feel like it, that's still a lot of power in the hands of a single person...
Both front and back end need to be decentralized and also separated from each other. Make all content available to all and have people develop a UI to access it, let the users curate their feed.
This way people sign up on one page and can use the same credentials no matter what page they go to, the competition for front end devs is to offer the best UI, the development for the hosting part is what's done as a community on GitHub or whatever...
The whole point of the fediverse is having a choice of admin. That democratizes the space because people can choose where to go. The point is not to rid yourself of admins entirely (or at least not without just becoming your own admin, but then there is still an admin, it's just yourself).
Sorry but the vast majority of users are not interested in curating their feed. Most people don't want to also be moderators. I mean fuck it's difficult to even recruit mods for even medium-sized communities. Most people don't like "absolute free speech" and want some level of moderation. Making all content available is not a path towards healthy platforms - it runs into the nazi bar problem instantaneously.
I won't even comment on the herculean technical challenge of doing it in the way you describe, but even if it was possible, I don't think it's actually desirable. It sounds good on the surface, but that's about it.
Communities would still have their moderators though, there just wouldn't be someone at the top that can decide that tomorrow you don't have access to the content from another instance anymore unless you switch to another instance yourself...
If there are no admins, who can ever decide who is a moderator? How do you decide that? The way it is currently decided is via admins granting mods powers on communities on that admin's instance. If you don't have admins, I don't see how you could possibly have mods.
Create the community > you're the mod, if people aren't happy with your moderation they create their own community
I suppose communities would not have unique names then - otherwise I'll just go ahead and create communities from all the words in the dictionary and then I control all communities.
So if they don't have unique names, how in the world do we refer to them? By some opaque UUID or something? I mean I guess it's possible, maybe.
Who's hosting this new community you just made? Where does it live? The description of the community, you know the side bar in a Lemmy community, where is that physically speaking?
You realize the way things work currently doesn't prevent that, right?
As I said from the beginning, front end and back end are separate.
Ok, let me put it another way. Reddit's content is decentralized already (everything isn't hosted on a single server, everything is backed up on multiple servers in multiple locations) but all its content is available from a single web page.
What I'm suggesting is that the hosting is "done the same way" just handled by anyone who wants to provide servers instead of dealing with a service like AWS. Now contrary to Reddit, that content is then made publically available so anyone can develop a front end for it. There could be a default option (Lemmy.com or whatever) but it would give users access to the exact same thing as any other website that offers access to the database via a UI. No defederation bullshit, no admins that can decide to wipe out part of the site (everything is backed up, you wipe your server, no one cares, all that content is pulled from another server instead), just a huge decentralized database anyone can access.
It totally does prevent it because every community has a unique name, when you include the instance domain. Which is the whole point. The instance is where the community lives.
Ok, but you can still go ahead and create the same community on every instance so you control all the communities with that name.
No! That's exactly what you can't do, because if you tried you'd get banned by the admin! In your scenario, there are no admins to stop such a bad actor. But ultimately admins control what communities are on their instance, so you can't just hijack all communities like that.