Context
- List of instances defederating from Threads, the Meta microblogging platform: https://fedipact.veganism.social/
- At the moment, Threads have incomplete federation with Fediverse microblogging instances: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-86/
- Another meme about Threads: https://feddit.uk/post/18194873
- Threads does not currently federate with link aggregators (Lemmy, Piefed)
- Threads could work with the microblogging part of Mbin
The main arguments for people to defederate are
- “Embrace, extend, and extinguish” strategy: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- A potential federation with Threads (should Thread decide to implement it) would overwhelm Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed with millions of users (compared to the 40k monthly current active users), transforming those platforms into a threaded version of Facebook
- Defederating preventively costs nothing
I’m pretty sure LW is trying to be Threads, or at least grow into some version of it. Why is, as you said, a mystery.
https://fedihosting.foundation/lw-team/#org-chart
I have 2 possible theories on that:
They want the federation to be all encompassing. Like a giant forum for corporations, governments and the common people. Sort of like a FOSS mall with a post office, community center and library included.
They’re ran and/or owned ultimately by a Reddit or Threads type company.
Someday I will write my master list of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories.
I was going to say that I didn’t have one for lemmy.world, so that would be a good addition, but I realized that I do: LW is being run by the Russians, as a cheap way to get a solid foothold over a new sector of social media, and that’s why there was that moment in time where Youtube was giving out Russian-language descriptions for all the videos that got posted to LW.
I have no evidence and it seems hilariously unlikely, but so does “Our Dutch sysadmin decided to host the server in Finland of all places, and then on top of that, Google decided to start handing out Russian-language descriptions when people accessed Youtube from Finland. And then, as soon as we found out about it, Google suddenly fixed it for us.”
My theory would also explain why the admin team makes certain perplexing decisions like pushing so hard to make a safe space for the disinfo accounts and then forbidding anyone from calling them out.
The Finns and Russians are famously chummy.
Practically the same country. I’m sure they share a ton of the same BGP routes, too, so it would be an incredibly easy thing to get crossed up on, when Google is doing their geolocation logic.
One of the admins shadow deletes comments. I called it out and was semi banned? Sometimes things go through and sometimes they don’t when I comment there by accident. Idk, I like a lot of the communities on there. I just don’t partake except for upvotes and downvotes.
Also, it’s a decent theory.
That’s very interesting. Can you DM me some examples?
I’ve been seeing some strange failures in my own posts there just recently, but I assumed it was perfectly legitimate federation weirdness, which happens sometimes. I didn’t give it a second thought.
It was in my Reddit PTSD days and I just rage quit. I deleted all of my posts and comments for the first few pages, lol. I think it was the reddit community, but it might have been the lemmyworld issues community. I thought it might be fediverse weirdness as well, but it was there and then went away a day later. That’s not how the weirdness works from my experience. I asked him why and he had a cocky answer like reddit admins of old so I rage quit. Which is funny now, it only hurt myself since I miss a lot of those communities. Their 3d printer community is fantastic.
I saw the admin get called out for it a month or so ago and the leader said that he “does too much for the community” to let go and to email them if you have any issues. That’s the ultimate reddit, meta, x, etc., move to me so I just ignored it. That dude is their fixer imo.
Can you DM me the usernames of the people involved?
how is that chart being built?
It’s made with Mermaid.
If you mean what decision process is behind it, or what the point is, I couldn’t tell you. It just looks weird and alarming to me.
There’s no money. And it’s not the right way to build a strong and successful community. So why, then, are they doing things in this fashion? The longer you look, the weirder it gets.
It looks like we haven’t put enough effort into naming things here, at least to me.
Tech Team Spiffy
May need work.
At the end of the day, any team that’s trying to accomplish a technological task needs:
As long as you’ve got those four roles covered, you’re probably good. You can have other people assisting, but if any of those isn’t covered, you’re in trouble.
It looks to me like LW has the first one covered and none of the other three. Their system administration team, whatever else is going on with the place, is killing it.
Can you have one person cover two roles? Could you have a head-slapping genius?
Yes, although it’s usually safer to let one person specialize in each. If you try to cross the streams, you can introduce instability. Your head-slapping genius can turn into a megalomaniac over time and drive everyone off the project. Your genius business guy can turn out to be an absolute loony, and persuade everyone to work on a project that makes no sense and will never work. It’s better if everyone picks a lane.
Tech Team Baldrick
Result!