I'm genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)

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[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I don't really care about that.

I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.

One of the fundamental issues with the current implementations in the Fediverse is that the server owns the keys and can do anything on behalf of the user.

That's the only major one i can think of.

again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.

but if you want to talk threadverse only: feddit.de. The original kbin, fmhy, one for writers that I forgot the name...

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I do. I care very much about identity and authenticity in the Fediverse. A server that can take posts done in one group and publish as their own is as unreliable as a server who puts fake posts impersonating a popular user.

Then we're at an impasse. But communities becoming completely modular and movable solves the problems you speak of. That's the answer.

again, why you are talking about Lemmy only? Mastodon instances from all sizes go down every other week.

Because I don't really care or know that much about Mastodon.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

That's the answer.

That's a bad, short-sighted, wrong answer. We can have decentralized identifiers. We have more than a couple FEPs that deal with portable objects correctly, and in the last FediForum there was a lot proposed strategies to allow migrations from both dead and live servers. None of them requires a server to unilaterally steal the content from another actor and pass it as their own.

People were criticizing me like hell because of the mirror bots on alien.top, but at least the bots were stealing from Reddit and they were meant to get people to migrate. This is implementation from PieFed may have good intentions, but the will lead to bad outcomes.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think an admin of a server would think that if a community sets up there and operates there that they "own" it, to be honest.

Also, currently, it would only duplicate the content and change how it appears from a Piefed instance.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

If you are the admin and developer of the server, you can do pretty much anything with it.

For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.

For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on !television@piefed.social and mirror them on !television@metacritics.zone. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you'd be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?

I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn't be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually,

No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (1 children)

I'd object and probably complain and it'd get your instance blacklisted. I'd support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.

But this isn't quite the way that community migration would work here - it's not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I'm not - whereas I'm talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.

If I posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn't really object to that.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 21 hours ago

You see, this is why it's important to understand that how ActivityPub works and why we can not think only in terms of "Reddit, but federated".

In terms of ActivityPub, a community that mirrors posts is exactly the same as someone that "retweets" a message. You may not even have realized, but it's quite possible that your posts/comments have been replicated on mastodon. Now that they are (finally) adding support for quote-posts, this will be even more common.

What I just described to you is this "communities following communities" idea. It's not about "giving the impression" of anything, it would be openly to aggregate all content in one single place and to avoid fragmentation.

Now, like I said in the linked discussion, I think that there is a legitimate complaint about taking content from one place and just moving it around. But at least the approach I am proposing is not fabricating anything. It's Piefed's implementation that is falsifying information. In my view, what PieFed is doing is objectively worse than a "reposting actor". Just like the "private voting" feature, it is beneficial for its own users but it's bad for the overall Fediverse.