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The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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Technology
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This only works to a degree. Eventually, the communities that allow people to register most easily and see the most active content become the overwhelming majority of the content on the system. And if these communities don't do a good job of self-policing, they just become mini-2008-style Reddits, filling up with the same bot accounts and serial assholes and sex pests that degraded the original.
Bigger sites start swamping smaller sites with traffic and overwhelming the capacity of smaller communities, so you get waves of defederation and new Walled Gardens of content.
The issue isn't the technology, its the participants in that technology. Too many malicious actors piling onto a platform and either corrupting the administration or degrading the quality of content will inevitably lead to enshitification.
Federation only mitigates this by allowing smaller instances to break away and abandon larger ones. It does nothing to screen the sincere and human actors from the malicious and automatic accounts.
hasnt this already happened with lemmy.world being the Big One?
They're leading the pack. Although, that could change if some supermassive community like Threads ever implemented a Lemmy API.
Still a relatively slight difference in scale between .world and Reddit compared to, say, .world and shi.tjustworks or lem.ee.
How does Threads federation work compared to Mastodon? Do they have an allow list?
Mastodon users can subscribe to Lemmy communities so I'm curious if Threads can already federate with Lemmy.
If they can, I've never seen it. No Threads content in any Lemmy instance I'm aware of and no way to use the Threads app as a client for lemmy.world or any of the others.
Yeah I've never seen it either. However, I was curious if it was because instances were blocking it (as in fedipact).
Checking out Lemmy.world, I noticed threads is actually listed as a linked server. So at some point, lemmy.world has traded content with threads.net.
Though I can't actually find the content. And there don't seem to be any threads.net users (except a couple who wrote it in their display name as some sort of joke), so perhaps there are some threads users who are following lemmy communities but haven't commented (or aren't able to)?
so far, the threads implementation is similar to the mastadon 'microblog' model. i suspect they could interact with the new lemmy pieces that allow that part of the protocol on lemmy systems that dont block them.
i picked mbin so i could have access to both the lemmy content and microblog content. ive been following a few threads accounts and have no intention of blocking them.