The "Fediverse" isn't the solution you think it is

[@TheCzele]

Are You really telling me that if I post something to the Internet I might not be able to fully remove it?

[@Graeaeae]

it gets worse, I've heard some people on here lie

[@logangraham2956]

@@Graeaeae impossible, nobody lies on the internet.

[@ambi_cc8464]

Good point lol, I think most of these vulnerabilities he talks about exist on the centralized internet now anyway

[@gh0s1wav]

​@@ambi_cc8464 typical youtuber

[@minecrafter9099]

well, anything you put on the internet should be considered to stay there forever. Signal resisted implementing deleting messages because of this, you may "delete" the thing, but it is likely cloned on someone's machine, either some company server or someone who mirrored all your data. All in all, before you post something, think a bit. Do you want that to come to you 10 years from now?

[@lexcelius6921]

Yeah and thing is if a Medium Successful Business can afford to build a PC(Server building) Capable of Backing up all the Internet's Data. Then Imagine how Easy and cheap it is for a Organization with Millions of Dollars Tax Payer Dollars.

[@belstar1128]

they seem to have vanished but there were these obscure Russian and kazakh sites about 7 to 10 years ago copying my videos and youtube comments they claimed to be either game guides or it was literally just youtube with a custom ui .and my videos got very low views and they are about very obscure 25 year old games i literally made them because there was no footage of them

[@xymaryai8283]

you should be allowed to make it more difficult, i think people have the right to be deleted, even if its impossible to ensure it. ActivityPub should have a way to mark orphaned content as illegally retained, even if it can't remove it or prevent it from being reuploaded.

[@ambi_cc8464]

⁠@@xymaryai8283then why decentralize in the first place? You should have no complaint about companies gatekeeping and taking down content that you like just because they want to make more money off of it or don’t care about supporting it

[@__Brandon__]

I don't think this has been fully thought out

[@Jordan-hz1wr]

The Fediverse never claims to be privacy centric. Even without federated services the posts you make on centralized platforms are still immortalized. You’re arguing a non sequitur. You’re also arguing that exercising your freedom to disassociate is somehow wrong. The fediverse allows me to not see posts from servers that allow nazis. The point is that the nazis can’t be “kicked off” the fediverse but I can tune them out if I want. You seem to be most upset that people have the ability to disassociate with shitty people and shitty ideas.

[@Ali-gy6zf]

blocking instances is fine if that option was only user controlled. i don't want server admins to make decisions for me.

[@Jordan-hz1wr]

@@Ali-gy6zf Agreed. That's exactly the type of freedom the Fediverse gives users.

[@ozzyphantom]

@@Ali-gy6zfthen make your own server

[@mememan9890]

@@Ali-gy6zf A server admin should be able to dictate who is allowed to make contact his his instance. Find an instance that agrees with you, or run you own.

[@belstar1128]

yea very nice but so far most of the servers just seem to ban people for things like watching anime or learning Spanish

[@cc.jsullivan]

I'm glad there's at least a few younger people promoting self-published websites. Thanks for the vid Denshi

[@KayloGL]

Questions for the social media study: 1. Why only 143 undergraduates? That sounds like a very low number. 2. Was it kind of obvious already that going outside and talking to people is emotionally better than using social media with internet trolls across the web and why would there be a need for a 5 year old study in order to explain that fact? 3. Why didn't they use Twitter, Reddit, or Discord as one of the platforms? They seem to avoid the more obviously toxic ones.

[@ambi_cc8464]

Good questions, I don’t doubt the results of the study but only because its conclusion is pretty obvious to anyone exposed to that side of the internet, otherwise I think that if the full data of the study was about how much he said in the video then it wasn’t a very good one

[@zazkegirotron]

Couldn't agree more with this. Everyone can run their own website!

[@ambi_cc8464]

I like the idea, but there’s too many consumer minded people now to make that very popular imo

[@ReaverZ3r0]

Even your onw fediverse instance

[@thefrankring]

You should ALWAYS be careful about what you post on the internet. Centralized or not. Even if you delete any content, it most likely stays hidden on the internet somewhere.

[@UCjNrKLyRJI-abFA8qiNo92Q]

this arguments are really poor, I was hoping something more solid

[@Cloudymindxii]

What was poor? Just say you disagree and keep it moving

[@lemonline3719]

Very much so

[@cupofdirtfordinner]

i still do not know what the fediverse is, thank you!

[@tkenben]

About not being able to delete things. It seems reasonable to argue that once you opt into participating on the internet, you kind of relinquish control of anything that happens to what you say after that. I'm actually surprised that people believe that anything they say on a public infrastructure is actually private. That's kind of like thinking that you going to the local pub naked and then afterward saying I should be able to delete everybody's memory of that. This idea must have come about after Snowden, because having seen the birth of the world wide web and grown up alongside it, it never once occurred to me that anything I did on the internet was actually anonymous or private. That's a recent and silly idea. In any case, unless you are really public and/or someone is really determined to keep what you say alive, good luck searching through the internet past to find stuff that *might* be still around on the "forever box". Hell, people still have trouble finding popular stuff on the way back machine. Finding something specific that someone said on the morass that is the fediverse would be monumentally impossible. In fact, the biggest drawback about the fediverse is the very fact you can't discover or search for anything. You can't "google" fediverse content.

[@ambi_cc8464]

I wholly agree with this, the internet never really was private and these public facing stores of content provided the illusion that it was to most people by giving the option to delete your things from their database, and you’re right about the fact that it is nearly a non issue about one’s own regretful content on the internet as it’s hard to find almost anything that doesn’t have a direct linear path backward from something else with relative popularity

[@MrJosch700]

Wow ok I have to say something here. Fist let's start with why I came to this video. I'm looking into the whole fediverse stuff so I don't have an account on any instance nor do I host my own. So what problems do I have with your video: 1. Privacy. What you are describing is not privacy. The important part is your personal information and tracking of those. And that's what fediverse fixes, if you decide to host your own instance or you have one you are trusting. Besides that, every post you make should be considered to be in the internet forever. 2. Freedom. That's why there is always the option to host your own instance. If you are blocked on let's say youtube that's it for you. In the fediverse you can host your own instance and still communicate with people. 3. Social Media in general. Yeah obviously fediverse doesn't fix the flaws of social media in general. That was never the goal though?! As with every new medium humans have to get used to it, to use it responsibly. A new type of social media never is gonna fix that.

[@ambi_cc8464]

I don’t really think most of these criticisms are valid; especially about data potentially never being scraped from every part of the internet and the idea that we shouldn’t change the internet cause it’s bad for mental health in the first place, both of these are kind of already expected and understood generally to happen on the internet(centralized or not) and imo guaranteeing that someone who posts something doesn’t have the power to rid the entire internet of that content is the exact point of decentralization so that people or groups who want to limit access for nefarious purposes can’t do so even if it also means that your cringe posts from a decade ago will still be public. On top of this we already deal with malicious actors in terms of content providers, so having them in the decentralized hosting network is to be expected, it’s just that you have a laundry list of other sources to avoid relying on these known malicious actors (which you can’t do in the current system where some content is locked to or most easily accessed at a shitty provider)

[@thomasmaier7053]

really excited to have found your channel, you have a way of presenting complex topics in an accessible way

[@TotemSP2]

Yeah, can we all remember that RSS is still awesome?

[@ZombVR]

Stopping kids from saying first, but also being first💀

[@applecastaway4256]

To summarise, the problem is internet socialising not which app was used to socialise

[@Theosibo]

Learning arch Linux alone has limited my social media use and skyrocketed my desire to secure my dada and improve my efficiency in coding and making a lucrative living doing it. I'm swapping from Twitter to RSS feeds THIS WEEK. Thanks for helping keep us boonies smart!

[@synth404]

Wow, you completely missed the point on all your arguments

[@xymaryai8283]

i think there needs to be a place for federated discussion. but perhaps XMPP is the better way to do it. the issue is it doesn't have a "Public Square" type area, everyone has their channel list and subscribed publishers, the content isn't really searchable, only the topics. maybe yeah, thats the role of a website, but still theres no discussion, a website has to host any discussion completely on its own. i think a less permanent structure of symlinked conversation is better, where caches are small and less able to be saved, any saved content that has been purged from its source should also be purged, or marked by the wider network as illegally retained. but the discussion should stay, orphaned symlinks will still stay as a marker on the network, meaning the data related to it is still retained, so if someone makes a bad take and delete it, the discussion of why it was bad doesnt get wiped because that is other people's data that contributed. stops corpo censorship, but allows the right to be deleted.

[@dsouth7754]

Federated social media is still social media. When it connects us, it's great. Otherwise all social media is a soapbox and a bullhorn. Not dissimilar to what I'm doing now, eheheh. All the associated doom scrolling and dopamine feedback is present whether it's on mastodon or X.

[@belstar1128]

i like the concept but 99% of the fediverse is hyper political and it has the same issues mainstream sites got but way worse. because the average user doesn't care about freedom at all i am not sure how this happened shouldn't those guys just be happy with reddit .

[@Gibblegobblegoob]

Glad to hear from you

[@T1Oracle]

Nothing could be worse for your privacy than Facebook, X, Instagram, KZbin, and TikTok.

[@c4llv07e]

So what? You say that fediverse is bad because of some problems, and then recommend rss, which also has all these problems. Or don't I understand? Everyone can still save all your "cringe rss posts" and there's nothing you can do about it. You can still ban some users. And the content itself is not much different from something like reddit, you are still "addicted" to the internet, there is no difference. I don't get it.

[@DNA9099]

When i understood correctly it's like the difference between someone taking a screenshot of your insta page or insta keeping your page public without the possibility to delete it. Yes you can block people but you don't get blocked by your provider and you decide what content is on your website. Browsing websites is just a whole different experience than social media platforms. The effect on a user is still dependent on the content they consume tho.

[@ReaverZ3r0]

You are totally wrong

[@GraysonMakesGames]

I remember joining a fediverse instance once and the owner blocked so many instances it felt like you were only talking to people on the same instance. The worst part is, the criteria for blocking instances was based on "vibe." No, I am not kidding. Something as ambiguous as a fucking "vibe" was used to block instances. I forgot the instance's name, but alot of them weren't even some of the more controversial ones (i.e: gab or kiwi farms' instance) they were basically just instances that didn't have many blocks. So much for federation, I guess.

[@JullianLue]

Big bad companies 😂😂😂 little nice people 😂😂😂

[@BRBWaffles]

These are only issues if you federate. So don't. Spin up your own instance (trivial to do), and just don't federate with untrusted instances, or any for that matter. If you have a platform, direct your followers to your self-hosted instances and federate them all together. That way you're in control. I'd rather have a lonely instance that is off the grid, so to speak, than be at the mercy of others any more than I need to be.

[@PanSebix]

I'm a proud owner of a website.

[@Mr.Mister96]

Polycentric for the WIN

[@playermat8574]

Question - Does one server have that much power to mess up the whole system? (Like the privacy bit) I get the impression that this can be mitigated/prevented with certain limitations on the servers.

[@ThecatThecat-hq1op]

It does not. Though there were/are some technical difficulties like spamming and other attacks, but those were not the intended effect.

[@cartanfan-youtube]

I agree that instead of social media we should be pushing people to develop personal sites and learning from it, but your criticism of the fediverse felt really weak and came across as if youve never actually used it (regardless of if you actually have!). It would be trivial to program a bot to crawl the entire fediverse and log all sorts of information. Not to mention the information you could collect on your users if your an instance host! And like you said, deletions can be fragmented between server to server. These are problems with fedi that id like to see fixed, but they arent as damning as you make them out to be. I think most people would be content with, and most responsible people already acknowledge that what you post on the Internet is out there and outside of your control. The same could be said about personal websites, anyone can log your website in the wayback machine, take a screenshot, or even just ctrl+s to save it. Once again, thats not to say it should be like this! But its not enough to completely discredit the existence of the fediverse. You also talk about defederation and censorship, which once again is a valid concern but not the damning end of fedi issue you make it out to be. Much like rss there isnt an algorithm that dictates egat you see. Its just what you follow and what the people you follow boost (you can even turn off boosts if you dont want to see them!). As well, there are instances that are extremely notorious for defederating any and everyone (cough cough .art), and it can suck if you want to interact with them but cant! This is honestly a solved issue though. Id argue setting up and maintaining your own personal instance is a step above hosting a personal website in terms of complexity. You'll have to know how to setup a database, pull stuff from git, as well as set up a reverse proxy on top of what youve learned setting up a website. Most instances will give you clear instructions, though it can be more difficult if you want to run something niche. But the payoff is huge! Allowing you to personally block (or not block) whoever you choose. Hosting an instance can also complement your personal site nicely! Personally i dont think its as black or white as just use rss, or just host your own personal website, or that fedi is somehow inherently flawed. The nice thing about it is you have the choice to mix and match whichever tools you want. your not forced to use it if its not something you vibe with.

[@backhdlp]

I don't know many people on the fediverse that don't have their own website and blog

[@bjarnenilsson80]

Hold on, imust have misunderstood somthing, so of i post somehimg to my mastadon/ peertube insyance and later decide to delete ir, som oyher server can keepa copy of my now deleted post even after any coaches expire? Thay does ot seam right what am I missing?😊

[@Crftbt]

Use Polycentric.

[@Mr.Mister96]

Exactly

[@aluisiofsjr]

Are there any social media done using Polycentric?

[@DMack6464]

I know "forever box" from donut operator lol

[@georgelincolnrockwell6248]

Never heard of the fediverse before this, but anything with 'fed' in it already raises some basic red flags.

[@Mr.Mister96]

Like America 🤨..fed as in federation,decentralization, peer to peer, A UNION

[@belstar1128]

yea its a funny coincidence but while i don't think its "fed" there is something suspicious about it

[@georgelincolnrockwell6248]

@@Mr.Mister96 A union of what, homosexual clowns?

[@ambi_cc8464]

That’s dumb lol, you’re opening yourself up to be ruled by demagogues if you let a title influence whether you even consider it rather than its content or concept

[@georgelincolnrockwell6248]

@@ambi_cc8464 1. It was tongue-in-cheek. 2. I'm already ruled by demagogues. I was born ruled by demagogues. Likely, so were you. You meant 'servile' then, I assume. 3. The chart-forgers have grown lazy, and utterly incompetent in many regards. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if they put zero effort into a honeypot like that.

[@tacticalcenter8658]

Duh. Its aweful

[@HiddenPalm]

Prism. Snowden.