Skip to content

Why Decentralized Social Media Matters

Technology
45 28 0
  • They really are, wished they had more diverse communities like reddit.

    That'll come over time. Reddit didn't start with all those diverse groups either. It was mostly tech based stuff with some news sprinkled in initially.

  • I will never go back. Lemmy and Mastodon are just amazing.

    Same brother. Still using Reddit from time to time though but wouldn't touch Xitter with even a pair of pliers.

    It's true that Lemmy doesn't have the same magnitude of content as Reddit but I'm trying to cut down on the doom scrolling so it's a good thing for me personally.

  • This post did not contain any content.

    I think it'd be great as well for giving better control towards what the user can block. Like servers or regions.

    Respectfully I don't care for German or Indian meme culture. It's just noise I have to scroll by.

  • Decentralization solves some problems, sure, but it creates new and arguably worse problems. Let's take Lemmy for example. Power hungry mods can and do still ban you from communities that you've never interacted with and there's nothing you can do about it. They can and do still remove your posts when they didn't actually break any rules and there's nothing you can do about it. There's still only really 1 big community per topic, because having a dozen tiny communities that all repost the same things but only have a dozen different people commenting on each one just doesn't work, which leads straight back to having centralized social media with centralized mods who control the narrative and bans.

    The point of social media is to interact with people, and splitting up a topic over a dozen tiny barely used instances isn't a better way of doing that than having one big centralized one. The only real benefit of decentralized social media is that it can't just disappear because one company turned it off.

    Reddit turned into a complete shitshow of power abusing mods, agendas being pushed, and circle jerk safe spaces for a particular political sides followers.......but almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are.

    Then there's the federation/defederation issue, where the instance you signed up to won't allow you to access some other instances and their communities because the owners/admins don't want you to, yet if you make another account on a different instance and don't hide that you're the same person as the other account, some mods will then ban you for "alt accounts" lol. Much like how reddit had no problem with alt accounts, but some mods and later admins did.

    Most people don't care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That's why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That's why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn't allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it's a "right leaning" platform and looking for other places.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation. Some of us believe that self moderation is all that's needed - if you don't like what someone is saying, just block them and move on. Don't call for their opinion to be silenced and their access to be taken away.

    Most people don’t care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That’s why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That’s why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it’s a “right leaning” platform and looking for other places.

    You had me at first, but you lost me here. "reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence" is not a correct description of what's going on over there and consequently the rest of that sentence is nonsense, just like the one-dimensional politicizing.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation.

    Sure, "some" certainly want that, but that's not the point of the fedi/lemmiverse and you know it. You took a very loooong breath to get to this in the end, even making it political along the way. Some people will upvote you only because they didn't take the time to finish reading.

    Also - the law is different in different countries, and the fediverse is global. "Unless you break the law with your speech" really isn't the point you think it is.

  • Oh, that's so much worse than Reddit, since there are no power hungry mods there /s

    Yeah that paragraph really got me. Very far from what is actually going down on reddit these days.

  • As you mentioned, Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause so this is in no way related to decentralization. If you want zero moderation then you're free to join one of the instances that have that as a guiding principle, but that is almost inevitably where all the nazis end up, which is why the rest of us avoid them.

    Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause

    And they now have a huge problem with bots & admins who ban "without just cause". Except to them it's no problem at all, it's the desired shift towards more "marketability" I guess.

  • Is there any Mastodon server that actually has an experience closer to Twitter? For example, having search enabled

    No. Unfortunately, ActivityPub just isn't geared up for that kind of thing. It's why BlueSky uses a different federation protocol called AtProtocol which is a lot more demanding than ActivityPub but is specifically intended for Twitter/TikTok style services.

  • Or in Lemmy's situation, to continue the censorship after Twitter put a stop to theirs.

    Luckily that's a per-instance issue you can easily work around.

  • Decentralization solves some problems, sure, but it creates new and arguably worse problems. Let's take Lemmy for example. Power hungry mods can and do still ban you from communities that you've never interacted with and there's nothing you can do about it. They can and do still remove your posts when they didn't actually break any rules and there's nothing you can do about it. There's still only really 1 big community per topic, because having a dozen tiny communities that all repost the same things but only have a dozen different people commenting on each one just doesn't work, which leads straight back to having centralized social media with centralized mods who control the narrative and bans.

    The point of social media is to interact with people, and splitting up a topic over a dozen tiny barely used instances isn't a better way of doing that than having one big centralized one. The only real benefit of decentralized social media is that it can't just disappear because one company turned it off.

    Reddit turned into a complete shitshow of power abusing mods, agendas being pushed, and circle jerk safe spaces for a particular political sides followers.......but almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are.

    Then there's the federation/defederation issue, where the instance you signed up to won't allow you to access some other instances and their communities because the owners/admins don't want you to, yet if you make another account on a different instance and don't hide that you're the same person as the other account, some mods will then ban you for "alt accounts" lol. Much like how reddit had no problem with alt accounts, but some mods and later admins did.

    Most people don't care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That's why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That's why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn't allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it's a "right leaning" platform and looking for other places.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation. Some of us believe that self moderation is all that's needed - if you don't like what someone is saying, just block them and move on. Don't call for their opinion to be silenced and their access to be taken away.

    Power hungry mods can

    Power-hungry people will do stupid shit, power corrupts. The more diluted the power the better.
    The issue is that before mass social media was a thing, people would just block someone they deemed annoying. Nowadays people whine for the mods to block undesirables because they got offended.

  • I think it'd be great as well for giving better control towards what the user can block. Like servers or regions.

    Respectfully I don't care for German or Indian meme culture. It's just noise I have to scroll by.

    You can already block instances in your profile. Just block feddit.org , never hear from me again, but also you won't see much german content. And you can deselect languages in your profile, too.

  • Is there any Mastodon server that actually has an experience closer to Twitter? For example, having search enabled

    Doesn’t mastodon leak a ton of metadata

  • As you mentioned, Reddit had a huge problem with moderators who banned without just cause so this is in no way related to decentralization. If you want zero moderation then you're free to join one of the instances that have that as a guiding principle, but that is almost inevitably where all the nazis end up, which is why the rest of us avoid them.

    I feel like you didn’t even read my post, as every sentence you wrote was already addressed.

  • Oh, that's so much worse than Reddit, since there are no power hungry mods there /s

    Completely missed the point I see.

  • Yeah that paragraph really got me. Very far from what is actually going down on reddit these days.

    What’s “actually going down” on Reddit these days?

  • Most people don’t care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That’s why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That’s why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it’s a “right leaning” platform and looking for other places.

    You had me at first, but you lost me here. "reddit doesn’t allow just outright death threats and calls for violence" is not a correct description of what's going on over there and consequently the rest of that sentence is nonsense, just like the one-dimensional politicizing.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation.

    Sure, "some" certainly want that, but that's not the point of the fedi/lemmiverse and you know it. You took a very loooong breath to get to this in the end, even making it political along the way. Some people will upvote you only because they didn't take the time to finish reading.

    Also - the law is different in different countries, and the fediverse is global. "Unless you break the law with your speech" really isn't the point you think it is.

    What in your opinion is going on at Reddit right now?

    I mentioned politics explicitly. I didn’t hide that. I mentioned it because politics has taken over almost all social media, especially Reddit and Lemmy.

  • They really are, wished they had more diverse communities like reddit.

    Reddit pretty much only had tech, humour, atheism, racism and cp its first 5 or 6 years as a platform.

  • Decentralization solves some problems, sure, but it creates new and arguably worse problems. Let's take Lemmy for example. Power hungry mods can and do still ban you from communities that you've never interacted with and there's nothing you can do about it. They can and do still remove your posts when they didn't actually break any rules and there's nothing you can do about it. There's still only really 1 big community per topic, because having a dozen tiny communities that all repost the same things but only have a dozen different people commenting on each one just doesn't work, which leads straight back to having centralized social media with centralized mods who control the narrative and bans.

    The point of social media is to interact with people, and splitting up a topic over a dozen tiny barely used instances isn't a better way of doing that than having one big centralized one. The only real benefit of decentralized social media is that it can't just disappear because one company turned it off.

    Reddit turned into a complete shitshow of power abusing mods, agendas being pushed, and circle jerk safe spaces for a particular political sides followers.......but almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are.

    Then there's the federation/defederation issue, where the instance you signed up to won't allow you to access some other instances and their communities because the owners/admins don't want you to, yet if you make another account on a different instance and don't hide that you're the same person as the other account, some mods will then ban you for "alt accounts" lol. Much like how reddit had no problem with alt accounts, but some mods and later admins did.

    Most people don't care about decentralization, they just want a place where everyone they disagree with is banned. That's why the left LOVED twitter pre-musk buyout, and then hated it since. That's why the right love truth social, cause there are no left people there. Now that reddit doesn't allow just outright death threats and calls for violence against people they hate, the left who love it are now claiming it's a "right leaning" platform and looking for other places.

    Some of us just want a place with zero bans and where unless you break the law with your speech, zero censorship and moderation. Some of us believe that self moderation is all that's needed - if you don't like what someone is saying, just block them and move on. Don't call for their opinion to be silenced and their access to be taken away.

    If you want a place with no bans, then start up your own instance. Nobody can ban you. Sure they could defederate from you, but they couldn’t ban you.

    If you want a platform that can’t ban anyone AND can’t block anyone, well you could make your own platform but I wouldn’t expect many to join you because nobody wants that.

    We have the freedom to say what we want. We don’t have the freedom to force people to hear it though.

  • If you want a place with no bans, then start up your own instance. Nobody can ban you. Sure they could defederate from you, but they couldn’t ban you.

    If you want a platform that can’t ban anyone AND can’t block anyone, well you could make your own platform but I wouldn’t expect many to join you because nobody wants that.

    We have the freedom to say what we want. We don’t have the freedom to force people to hear it though.

    The point is that everyone else can still ban you. I’m not sure you even understood my original post if that’s your response.

    Here we don’t have the freedom to say why we want, because you’ll be banned instantly for saying many things that aren’t even controversial unless you’re deep inside one political side.

  • You can already block instances in your profile. Just block feddit.org , never hear from me again, but also you won't see much german content. And you can deselect languages in your profile, too.

    Just FYI: blocking instances only blocks the communities on the instances, not the users if they post outside of their instance.

    Example: If you blocked Pawb.Social, you'd still see this comment from me on Lemmy.World.

  • I feel like you didn’t even read my post, as every sentence you wrote was already addressed.

    Where did you address them? You just claim that

    almost every Lemmy instance is the same, many significantly worse in terms of how authoritarian they are

    Without any explanation for why that would be the case whereas I have not have at all had the same experience. Therefore, I don't see how it relates to federated social media at all.

    Furthermore, you just state that

    some of us just want a place with zero bans and which unless you break the law with your speech, zero bans and moderation

    And to just "block them and move on". Honestly, I don't want my time using social media to be spent having to personally block multiple accounts (by people who will probably make more accounts) because they're racists, misogynists, foreign bot farms, etc. Furthermore, I don't want my content and my comments to be used, knowingly or otherwise, to prop up comment sections and threads that are spreading disinformation and bigotry.

    If you want that, that's fine. Go to one of those places. But from what I've seen, they are usually where nazis end up congregating, which is one reason why I (and at least some other people) prefer to avoid them.

  • 69 Stimmen
    9 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    M
    Mr President, could you describe supersonic flight? (said with the emotion of "for all us dumbasses") Oh man there's going to be a barrier, but it's invisible, but it's the greatest barrier man has ever known. I gotta stop
  • This Month in Redox - May 2025

    Technology technology
    1
    21 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • 216 Stimmen
    118 Beiträge
    2 Aufrufe
    A
    Outlook has search?!
  • Generative AI's most prominent skeptic doubles down

    Technology technology
    14
    1
    43 Stimmen
    14 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    Z
    I don't think so, and I believe not even the current technology used for neural network simulations will bring us to AGI, yet alone LLMs.
  • 5 Stimmen
    2 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    alphane_moon@lemmy.worldA
    I don't drive and have minimal experience with cars. Does it make a big difference whether your Android Automotive solution is based on Android 13 or 15? It's been a long time since I've cared about OS upgrades for Android on smartphones, perhaps the situation is different with Android Automotive?
  • 30 Stimmen
    6 Beiträge
    3 Aufrufe
    S
    The thing about compelling lies is not that they are new, just that they are easier to expand. The most common effect of compelling lies is their ability to get well-intentioned people to support malign causes and give their money to fraudsters. So, expect that to expand, kind of like it already has been. The big question for me is what the response will be. Will we make lying illegal? Will we become a world of ever more paranoid isolationists, returning to clans, families, households, as the largest social group you can trust? Will most people even have the intelligence to see what is happenning and respond? Or will most people be turned into info-puppets, controlled into behaviours by manipulation of their information diet to an unprecedented degree? I don't know.
  • 0 Stimmen
    6 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    P
    Outlook.... Ok Pretty solid Bahaha hahahahaha Sorry. Outlook is a lot of things. "Gooey crap" would be one way to describe it, but "solid"? Yeah, no. Gmail is (well, was) pretty solid. There are a lot of other webmail providers out there, including self hosted options and most are pretty solid, yeah. Outlook, though? It's a shit show, it's annoying. Do you love me? Please love me, please give feedback, please give feedback again, please look at this, hey am I the best? Am I.. STFU YOU PIECE OF CRAP! Can you PLEASE just let me do my email without being an attention whore every hour? Even down to the basics. Back button? "What is that? Never heard of it, can't go back to the message I just was on because I'm Microsoft software and so half baked." Having two tabs open? "Oh noes, now I get scawed, now I don't know how to manage sessions anymore, better just sign you out everywhere." What is it with Microsoft and not being able to do something basic as sessions normal? I'm not even asking for good, definitely not "awesome", just normal, and that is already too much to ask. Try running it in Firefox! I'm sure it's totally not on purpose, just "oopsie woopsie poopsie" accidentally bwoken. Maybe it's working again today, who knows, tomorrow it'll be broken again. I run everything on Firefox except the Microsoft sites, they have to be in chrome because fuck you, that's why. Seriously, I can't take any Microsoft software seriously at this point, and all of it is on its way out in our company, I'm making sure of that
  • 0 Stimmen
    6 Beiträge
    0 Aufrufe
    L
    Nah, you just select domain join. I did that a few weeks ago on a Win 11 enterprise install. But if you deal with new installs "all the time" you should really consider automating the setup and domain joining, instead of manually creating local accounts and then domain joining.