I ran my own instance for a little bit, and I thought if you had servers you set up to “trust” (I forget the exact wording but there’s a field for it in admin settings) then bans can come in that way.

I could be completely wrong of course. ☺️

The other thing that I don’t quite get about it is, you can come across the “fragmented communities” either through random chance or consciously seeking them out, and just subscribe to them. Now you can participate in multiple communities from your home instance.

I get people are lazy and just want to have the stuff they like shoved in their face, but IMHO you get a much better result when you have to put a little skin in the game.

It also discourages some level of shitposting because shitposters have to work just as hard to find the places to make their dumb jokes and in my experience most of those types are not going out of their way to do that.

“Insert_Bad_Actor” is so widely vague that it can apply anywhere to anyone (slippery slope, I know, but this entire discussion hinges on some application of the principle).

Two months ago the rallying cry for federation/fediverse was “YOU CAN CONTROL IT” which very quickly has morphed into “YOU CAN CONTROL IT AS LONG AS YOU FIT IN THIS PARTICULAR BOX.” A lot of this feels like it’s coming from a place of fear, which is not a great place to make informed and logical decisions from.

A lot of the discussion I’ve seen here and on Mastodon around Meta/Threads/federating with a corporate entity seems to be circling around three issues.

1. Privacy. There is an assumption that as soon as Meta gets it’s fingers into the metaverse pie they’ll hoover up everything they can. My question to anyone that thinks this is, “How do you know they don’t do it already?” Meta can very easily have a server setup somewhere to pull in ActivityPub information. IT’S THE ENTIRE POINT OF FEDERATION. You can’t stop them, other than to block the instance. So unless someone figures out that Meta is running a particular instance and then announces it so that admins can block it, it’s reasonable to assume it’s already happening. This just means what you post already isn’t private, and never should be assumed to be.

2. Ads. Somehow people think that Meta will abuse federation to sells ads to send out as posts. Which, if they do that, they will be quickly blocked and they’ve just ruined their new crop of eyeballs. On top of that, sending ads out into the void to end up next to god knows what content, on god knows what server, in front of god knows who, is not something that most ad buyers are going to spend money on. Any ad buyers want to know that they are getting value for their spend.

3. EEE, or Embrace Extend Extinguish. This is to me the most valid argument for keeping them at arm’s length. The basic premise is that these huge corps can spend the money up front to build on top of an open standard, add improvements that will be limited to only their version, then once they have the market share/cornered pull the rug out by either defederating and hurting the whole thing, or by locking users in to their “better” service. This has happened a number of times in the past, and Facebook has been guilty of it themselves.

Whatever happens with this in the future will be interesting to watch unfold, that’s for sure. But doing anything before the service even has the hooks to connect in and federate seem so premature to me.

Love this idea! Please share if/when you think it’s ready.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.

Back when blogs were a bigger thing, they would be setup with RSS to “push out” notifications when new posts were published. (Technically your RSS client pulls the RSS feeds but the end result is the same - the feed is just a list of posts basically).

You open up your RSS client or site and there will be a list of sites you’re “following” and any new posts they’ve made.

Plenty of sites still support RSS. A lot of readers can pull the RSS feed automatically if you just give them the site URL/web address.

My personal choice is NewsBlur which is at https://NewsBlur.com. You can get a free account there to try it out.

Laughs in BBS

or

Laughs in Newgroups