Except that, because of network effet, people will keep using the service no matter how bad it becomes, as long as it keep a few basic functionalities?

This is the problem. You are projecting what you consider bad to the majority of users. What you call “a few basic functionalities” is all that people want; they don’t care about the rest. They are not staying there because of “network effect”, they are staying because their “few basic functionalities” are satisfied.

They will demand change only when these “few basic functionalities” are violated (for example, ads that make it impossible to watch videos). This is inevitable, but big tech will try to delay it with subscriptions etc.

The majority of people don’t see a problem in capitalism either, does it mean one should stop advocating against it.

Facebook is a company that harvests users’ data and attention, under the hood of some social networking capabilities. Having a facebook account is not a sin, but it is exposing oneself to that, as well as pressuring one’s friends into doing the same, as I mentioned above

Unlike your argument against Facebook, the advocacy against capitalism is not a moral one; it is a recognition of the irreconcilable contradictions that arise from private ownership and socialised labour. The majority of people will eventually find themselves in a position where it is necessary to fight capitalism. In the same way, the majority of social media users will find themselves in a position to advocate for better alternatives once the contradictions deepen. And when they look for alternatives, federated social media will always be inferior to centralised solutions.

People leave reddit for lemmy because their “few basic functionalities” were violated. Moving to a federated solution can somewhat solve it, but only at the cost of problems inferior federated software brings. Nobody is willing to tolerate them, except tinkerers who want to play with federated software.

It’s not the evilness of capitalists that will bring the revolution, but the internal contradictions themselves.

I don’t outright reject the idea that network effects exist; they do. However, if your argument about network effects is correct, it means that big tech will never be replaced; no amount of alternative federated software you write will be able to replace the “network.” This would imply that big tech has found this small trick that solves all other contradictions and they have reached an ideal stage with no contradictions like communism, in reality the network effect is just a side effect that you observe because of the differences between your needs and the needs of the majority.

Federation aims at that, by allowing to build a big network without a single person being able to impose marketing choices over the whole network

Nice dream. But in the real world, the majority of fediverse users are centralised on a few servers, and a minority of admins decide the shape of the network. You have become the same thing you wanted to destroy.

Moral reasoning has nothing to do with Marxist theory. But many Marxists use moral arguments in their propaganda in the hope that liberals will be taught dialectics once they sympathise with our cause. But these days, these classes are rarely done. Mostly because you can’t monitor their learning progress online.

Today, there are many liberals online masquerading as MLs who use moral arguments to reach the same conclusions as MLs. Therefore, as soon as the subject of analysis becomes a little more complicated (such as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict), they start blabbing nonsense.

edit: paraphrased for clarity

Think about the headache that would be had if to send an email, the domain name had to be the same.

Think about all the headaches we have now because anyone with a domain can send spam emails to you. Email would have been much better if there were only a few, or at best, a single email provider. In fact, the reason why email is usable today is because we don’t treat all domains as equal and put more trust in a few providers. The concentration of email users into a few domains is what allows it to be used by so many people today.

If you want to live in your own instance, atleast with lemmy, you can just never leave the local tab,

But users from other instances can still interact with local posts.

as for Lemmygrad pushing to de-federate, dieing out, or pushing for lemmy or other instinces to purge users, I have not seen that, the closest I have seen is a “this is why purges are necessary” and that is a comment ment for the in group, as lemmy.ml mentions they are a leftist website.

I didn’t mean to single out any particular incident or group of users. I was attempting to make the point that federation is a major roadblock to the ability of every group of people to block “outsiders.” Other important needs of people are also hampered by federation (for example, discoverability).

Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning

True

Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions,” he warns, “represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics” (p. 348). And he adds that, “[T]he independent existence of Ukraine (especially within its present borders) can make sense only as a ‘sanitary cordon’…”

True

Same is true for many other ‘countries’ .

The Fediverse has 5 millions of users. I don’ t think more than 100 of them are developers.

My bad. I meant that the people who actually make use of federation are almost exclusively programmers. The rest of the users don’t benefit from federation.

If, in your opinion, the problem of big tech is not the centralization of power within a few hands, please explain what it is.

The problem is not the centralization of power within a few hands, but the contradiction between the needs of the users and the needs of these few hands. It’s okay to let a few hands hold all the power, as long as their interests align with ours. Your philosophical disagreement with this concept has very little effect on reality. As long as big tech can meet the needs of people, they will keep using their services. Federation is a tool that will make meeting the needs of people very hard, if not impossible. There are areas where the interests of big tech are in direct, irreconcilable conflict with those of users (e.g., ads; users want as little as possible, big tech wants the maximum). If you want to solve the problems of users, you should first figure out irreconcilable contradictions like this and then solve them without hurting the needs of people that are currently being met by big tech.

Sure, if the goal is to build a filter bubble

This is what the people want, everybody trying to use social media want filter bubbles, federation adds a huge and unnecessary obstacle to this, there is a thread now on lemmy where people are discussing ways to block entire instances.

Lemmygrad users do not complain about the rest of the Fediverse speaking only about tech and federation, they complain about them disagreeing with their view.

That’s not what i said, like mentioned above i was trying to show you why filter bubbles are a necessity for anyone who is not an idealist fediverse advocate.

This is the thing people want to escape with federation

Which people are you talking about? The majority of the people don’t have any problem with this, why should they change their ways because some nerds decided that making a facebook account is a sin?.

I’m a brown liberal

Understandable have a nice day

Do you have example of people demanding defederation because they are non-techie?

well i guess you missed the latest drama on lemmygrad where they where asking to purge all the liberals from lemmy.ml.

And no i don’t think this is an issue of adoption stage, because federation is a useless feature to the general public, the only people who will ever need federation are software enthusiasts and even then just as a toy to play with.

You seem to imply that the solution to capitalism is to forget that it is a problem

The solution to the contradictions of capitalism is building socialism. Do we throw away the progress of industrialization because it was done by capitalists? No, we correct the contradiction of ownership of capital by seizing it from them. Centralization, like industrialization, is a very important and progressive step that transformed internet communication. You can undo this step, but you will always end up learning the bitter way that centralization is an inevitability for any social media of the masses.

you probably misunderstood primitive communism

The dogmatic view that there can be no freedom without federation is not healthy, the real source of the supposed freedom that federation gives is open source. there are freedoms that federation provide but those are only relevant if you actually host an instance, otherwise what is the difference between a regular open source reddit alternative and lemmy? you can checkout hexbear.net which runs an older version of lemmy without federation, they are just as active if not more than lemmygrad (very similar userbase) the only difference is that they don’t have to deal with the inherent problems of federation and their admins can actually focus on building the community instead of wasting their time trying to reinvent ways to prevent spam from randomly popping up servers.

If we want to challenge mainstream media, we must address the real issues that users of mainstream media face, reach out to them, and understand their genuine dissatisfactions. Is this what fediverse developers do? They all get together and decide that the problem people have is a lack of federation and go on to write walls of code without any consideration for the general audience. They never seek feedback from the people. They get all their validation from their peers who also believe that lack of federation is the problem. This is what I described as a cult. It might be a little harsh, but I couldn’t find any better words.

This complete alienation from the real users is what makes you believe that writing a federated tiktok will materialise into anything more than a graveyard of instances. If the fediverse developers actually understood the needs of the people, Peertube would already have something similar to YouTube shorts or Instagram reels. Facebook and Google might be evil, but they actually have to build software that matters to people or they will lose the users they have. The Fediverse has no real users except the developers themselves, so they can build whatever nonsense they want. In your example, you are assuming that the Facebook userbase actually cares about the messaging protocol. I’m pretty sure they don’t even know what that is. Many issues you may have with social media are non-issues or mild inconveniences for the majority of the population.

Calm down, dude. This is why I didn’t want to write a lot of text all at once. The analogy made perfect sense to me, but only when someone else read it did I realise that it might not be the best way to describe it.

There are many ways to interpret an analogy. I guess it’s my mistake that I didn’t properly guide the reader to the intended interpretation. Obviously, I’m not talking about the connectivity of cities. At the end of the text, you can see me using the term city synonymously with the modern world.

Fediverse claims to be “for the people by the people,” but if you examine any real Fediverse project, you can see how it’s actually “for the system admins by the programmers.” Federation is just a toy feature for its developers and other software enthusiasts to play with.

Why do you think all of the Fediverse has the same boring demographic of privalaged keyboard warrior programmers pretending like they are leading the revolution against big tech? And why is it that whenever another demographic arrives as refugees, they immediately demand defederation or die out immediately?

The open for everyone approach made sense in the early days of the internet, when everyone capable of using the internet was also able to develop and improve it (to some extent). But the modern internet is not like that. It has people from many different backgrounds. They can’t host millions of instances of Peertube to watch cat videos. Centralized software makes internet communication accessible to the masses with unprecedented efficiency that doesn’t force my grandma to own and maintain servers.

Sometimes I self-censor words like “capitalism” to appeal to certain audiences. I guess it would have made more sense if I said that the solution to capitalism is not abandoning the productive forces it gave us to go back to primitive communism or arguing that everyone should become capitalists by owning enough capital.

Going back to the off-grid analogy, arguing that everyone should host their own instance because you don’t like some corporate policy is not any different from arguing that everyone who is upset about landlords should abandon modern apartments, cities, and all their comforts to go back to nature and start engineering mud houses.

Centralized social media is a superior and progressive technology that makes internet communication accessible to the people. Sure, it is not made by the people, but it certainly is made for them. And trying to solve that contradiction by considering everyone who isn’t involved in the “making process” as not “people” is regressive.

There is a wall of text about this theory in my head, but writing it all at once will only serve to reinforce my confirmation bias. I’m trying to elicit a response that will stress test my theory so that I can return to these discussions later and create a coherent write up.

Federation is like living off the grid because you don’t like cities and their administration. Blinded by their privilege, they argue that everyone should follow them and their methods are the future. Sitting in their log cabins in the middle of nowhere, they lament about the crisis of cities and how tearing them down is the way of progress.

When you examine the history of the internet, you can see how centralization transformed the inefficient federated services accessible only to the privileged as toys into utilities that positively impacted the lives of the masses. The remaining prevalent federated services, plagued with the curses of federation like email, are systematically stripped of their federation features to make them fit the needs of the modern world.

The fediverse advocates are like the above mentioned primitivists, who, while correctly identifying certain problems with cities or modern civilization, suggest the regressive path to primitivism as a solution to them without realising that we have been there and even if you somehow managed to achieve it, we will still, by historical necessity, come back to where we are today.

Yikes, The fediverse is a cult of developers who engage in self-indulgent software creation to satisfy their regressive notion of decentralization.

The west is crumbling from the weight of its contradictions. It’s been a long time since they have known fear. They didn’t fear leftist ideas before because they wouldn’t really change anything because the western proletariat didn’t exist. At that time, there was only a labour aristocracy that benefited from the neoliberal policies that kept the world on its knees. Now that the world is rising from its knees, the birth of the western proletariat will follow. What we are seeing now is the attempt of the bourgeoisie to strangle it before it leaves the womb.

Why are you upset about someone’s pet project that they haven’t touched in seven years?? A quick glance at their profile also tells me that English isn’t their native language. They probably used the word “productive” wrong. Additionally they were probably only starting to learn to code and didn’t know how to adjust the CSS properly and might have thought that leaving a placeholder is better than showing an ugly layout.

We cannot hide from the reality comrade, our theories predict that fascist rhetoric will get stronger, more pervasive and well concealed as capitalist contradictions deepen. In the final struggle, we will bury these fascists in the grave capitalism is digging now.

Wholesome ukraine winning hearts of their ‘citizens’ by blocking access to their water source

maybe maybe maybe

Turning off federation would have the added benefit of stopping the crazies from coming on here

After reading this conversation, I had the similar thought. Instead of wasting effort resolving federation-related issues, it would be far better to concentrate on enhancing other parts of the Lemmy software and community if federation doesn’t actually offer much value to the majority of users.

When i have to mechanically write boilerplate code

Men’s rights is a fundamentally reactionary movement found solely to counter the revolutionary movement of feminism. It’s just like ‘All lives matter’. Let’s change some words in your question to expose it’s absurdity

'Not the right wing All lives matter, Some kind of left version that would fundamentally be a BLM movement but with different branding. Different branding would be necessary to absorb a bunch of white people into it.

“We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them,” said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. The terminology used with large language models, like “learning” or even “neural nets,” creates a false analogy to the human brain, she said.