They only have control in the sense that they can shut down the website, but the content itself isn’t in their control. It would also be possible to have the hosting under a decentralized entity controlled democratically by the people providing the hosting space (à la DAO/DAC in crypto).
I just feel like the whole problem the fediverse is trying to solve is admins slowly selling out and then having to move somewhere else. Having one website still has that problem of switching costs if you want to go somewhere else, you lose access to everything in that sphere of content. If the sh.itjust.works admins go crazy and start moderating in a way you don’t like, you can go sign up on another instance and not lose any of the communities or people you used on your former instance.
But you still rely on the admins of your new instead to decide what content you have access to and on the admins of others instances for the same thing. What I’m saying is that the admins shouldn’t have that kind of power. Heck, the website issue could be solved by having a disconnection between the front and back end.
Decentralize the hosting and make the data available to all (this way all hosts have some of the data but not all of it and you can have all data backed up by other hosts so no host can just nuke part of the website) this way anyone is able to create a frontend. So sh.itjust.works would just show me all of Lemmy’s content in the way the dev decided would be best (the UI would be of their choosing), but I would be the one deciding which communities and users I’m blocking. If I decide I don’t like how my chosen frontend works anymore I could just go and log in to another frontend using the same credentials because the data isn’t hosted on the frontend’s servers.
That is literally the way it works now. As an example - go to https://phtn.app/. Photon is a UI for lemmy. That specific website is hosted by the developer and you can log into any instance. I think Alexandrite and Voyager webapps act the same, but I haven’t tried them, so can’t be sure atm.
No it’s not, your instance of choice isn’t necessarily federated with 100% of all instances. The UI you’re using is loading the content that your instance gives you access to only. Example v I can’t see hexbear communities and they can’t see communities from my instance so the only place I can interact with hexbear users is if they comment on communities both our instances are federated with.
That’s because you’ve chosen an instance that is more heavily curated. You can check which instances yours has defederated from at sh.itjust.works/instances
But if you look at the same page on mander.xyz/instances my admins are only defederates from threads.net and burggit.moe, so I already experience the fediverse as you describe.
But other instances can choose to defederste from Mander so their users can’t post on Mander’s communities, it’s a two way street. Just the fact that it’s defederated from those two should make you understand that you as a user don’t control the content you have access to, an admin decided that threads and burggit would be inaccessible to you.
The solution I’m talking about eliminates that completely, treat the hosting the same way any other website works (a bunch of servers hosting the data with redundancy, the difference being that it’s people like you and me providing the storage space instead of an all in one service like AWS), make access to that data open and let people create a UI for users. No more defederation or admins that hold power over all communities under the umbrella of an instance, just community mods and a website where users are the ones in control of their experience.
While I agree that an IPFS solution could be quite resilient, I’m not sure that the average person is willing to put up the resources or risk of hosting content. CSAM, copyright, etc, all become more of an individual risk that you’re relying on moderators to mitigate for you. (Rather than the risk going to the server hosts typically doing the moderation covering their own ass)
Additionally, while there may be decent representation of people willing to do some small amount of hosting of services (myself included) on lemmy, I think making this mandatory really limits the growth of your social media platform.
I think you could achieve what you’re looking for right now by self-hosting a private lemmy instance with signups closed, and this wouldn’t close you out of existing federating platforms.
The people currently doing the hosting would be the same ones doing the hosting (I’m not talking about every user hosting their own content), they just would choose to host NSFW content or not as they already do by choosing to allow NSFW communities on their instance or not (and would use the necessary tools to cleanup their storage of illegal content as they already do) and users who choose to activate NSFW content in their feed would do it at their own risk (which is pretty much already the case anyway because instances/communities with CSAM don’t get deleted/banned/defederated until someone does it, it’s just your/the other instance’s admin that’s doing it instead of you).
They only have control in the sense that they can shut down the website, but the content itself isn’t in their control. It would also be possible to have the hosting under a decentralized entity controlled democratically by the people providing the hosting space (à la DAO/DAC in crypto).
I just feel like the whole problem the fediverse is trying to solve is admins slowly selling out and then having to move somewhere else. Having one website still has that problem of switching costs if you want to go somewhere else, you lose access to everything in that sphere of content. If the sh.itjust.works admins go crazy and start moderating in a way you don’t like, you can go sign up on another instance and not lose any of the communities or people you used on your former instance.
But you still rely on the admins of your new instead to decide what content you have access to and on the admins of others instances for the same thing. What I’m saying is that the admins shouldn’t have that kind of power. Heck, the website issue could be solved by having a disconnection between the front and back end.
Decentralize the hosting and make the data available to all (this way all hosts have some of the data but not all of it and you can have all data backed up by other hosts so no host can just nuke part of the website) this way anyone is able to create a frontend. So sh.itjust.works would just show me all of Lemmy’s content in the way the dev decided would be best (the UI would be of their choosing), but I would be the one deciding which communities and users I’m blocking. If I decide I don’t like how my chosen frontend works anymore I could just go and log in to another frontend using the same credentials because the data isn’t hosted on the frontend’s servers.
No admins, just community moderators.
That is literally the way it works now. As an example - go to https://phtn.app/. Photon is a UI for lemmy. That specific website is hosted by the developer and you can log into any instance. I think Alexandrite and Voyager webapps act the same, but I haven’t tried them, so can’t be sure atm.
No it’s not, your instance of choice isn’t necessarily federated with 100% of all instances. The UI you’re using is loading the content that your instance gives you access to only. Example v I can’t see hexbear communities and they can’t see communities from my instance so the only place I can interact with hexbear users is if they comment on communities both our instances are federated with.
That’s because you’ve chosen an instance that is more heavily curated. You can check which instances yours has defederated from at sh.itjust.works/instances
But if you look at the same page on mander.xyz/instances my admins are only defederates from threads.net and burggit.moe, so I already experience the fediverse as you describe.
But other instances can choose to defederste from Mander so their users can’t post on Mander’s communities, it’s a two way street. Just the fact that it’s defederated from those two should make you understand that you as a user don’t control the content you have access to, an admin decided that threads and burggit would be inaccessible to you.
The solution I’m talking about eliminates that completely, treat the hosting the same way any other website works (a bunch of servers hosting the data with redundancy, the difference being that it’s people like you and me providing the storage space instead of an all in one service like AWS), make access to that data open and let people create a UI for users. No more defederation or admins that hold power over all communities under the umbrella of an instance, just community mods and a website where users are the ones in control of their experience.
While I agree that an IPFS solution could be quite resilient, I’m not sure that the average person is willing to put up the resources or risk of hosting content. CSAM, copyright, etc, all become more of an individual risk that you’re relying on moderators to mitigate for you. (Rather than the risk going to the server hosts typically doing the moderation covering their own ass)
Additionally, while there may be decent representation of people willing to do some small amount of hosting of services (myself included) on lemmy, I think making this mandatory really limits the growth of your social media platform.
I think you could achieve what you’re looking for right now by self-hosting a private lemmy instance with signups closed, and this wouldn’t close you out of existing federating platforms.
The people currently doing the hosting would be the same ones doing the hosting (I’m not talking about every user hosting their own content), they just would choose to host NSFW content or not as they already do by choosing to allow NSFW communities on their instance or not (and would use the necessary tools to cleanup their storage of illegal content as they already do) and users who choose to activate NSFW content in their feed would do it at their own risk (which is pretty much already the case anyway because instances/communities with CSAM don’t get deleted/banned/defederated until someone does it, it’s just your/the other instance’s admin that’s doing it instead of you).
How do you deal with CSAM and hate speech instances? Those are generally the ones everyone wants to defederate from
Hosts and users get the choice to turn NSFW content on or off at their own risk (for hosting and for seeing in their feed respectively).
Hate speech isn’t illegal to see, users would block communities/users by themselves.