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)
I don’t really care about that. If the idea of communities being effectively modular becomes an accepted standard, then no-one will blink an eye at their posts on a prior community being redirected after the fact to another instance.
We don’t have constant failures though? What are you referring to here? Lemm.ee crashed out due to owner/admins burnout. That’s the only major one i can think of.
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.
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…
Then we’re at an impasse. But communities becoming completely modular and movable solves the problems you speak of. That’s the answer.
Because I don’t really care or know that much about Mastodon.
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.
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.
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?
Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.
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.
No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.
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.