My point is that we should take their current approach as a good thing.

I"m not saying that we should blindly trust them, but I am saying that if we want corporations to Do The Right Things, then it’s a lot better to let them have a seat at the table and participate with the community than to simply ostracize them forever because of their past wrongdoings.

They don’t “need” the SWF. If Zuckerberg wanted to simply takeover the control of ActivityPub, they could just use their existing devrel people that work with the W3C and push the changes directly at the “authoritative” organization.

If you have examples of relays differentiating themselves based on moderation policies, it would be appreciated. Not just “we are extreme free speech holders” vs “we pay attention to some laws here”. What nostr relay is actually running a strict filter, or do any type of analysis on the message content beyond “payment only”?

as if instances have not gone down with users identities.

If instances go down, there are still lots of possible backups: someone can recover the domain name and regenerate keys (or even recover a database copy). If someone loses a private key, there is no turning back. The fact that (some) poorly managed system are not recoverable does not mean that it is as fragile as something as nostr that gives up completely on making it.

allowing users the ability to drive their own experiences.

The same can be achieved on ActivityPub, no new protocol is needed for that.

Also, this is not matter of individualism, but of UX. It’s “nice” when users have the ability to make decisions on their own, but it is terrible when they have to make all decisions on their own to get started.

“If you think sex workers ‘sell their bodies,’ but coal miners do not, your view of labor is clouded by your moralistic view of sexuality.”

If you are going to start a conversation by attacking a strawman, then I really will not get into it.

acting in commercial porn is just as normal and unremarkable as any other job

If this is your idea of being “sex positive” then I really do not want to get into this argument. I can guess this will quickly play out to any objection as “pearl clutching” and I will stick to the point that your attitude is completely dehumanizing and that there is nothing “positive” about reducing sex to the mechanical/physical act.

Like I said in the first comment, if you feel so strongly about this, go ahead and create your own and see how far it goes. When you start putting some Skin In The Game you will get more credibility or at least accept that things are Just Not That Simple.

advocating for them to be treated on absolutely equal footing; they’re specially marked so that people who don’t

You lamented the fact that unlogged users can not see it and that they can not be found as easily. This is the same as “make it available to the public without any type of check”.

It’s treating sexuality as something toxic

Sexuality != Porn, and “toxicity” is dose-dependent. Eating a bit of broccoli is good for you. Too much at once and you get thyroid dysfunction.

There are plenty of things that are good and normal, but need to be discussed/presented with a proper context and (most importantly) people need to have a better understanding of the potential bad consequences if it is abused or corrupted.

You don’t see young people destroying their lives because they were promised they could make a lot of money by knitting sweaters or working as electricians, but cases of vulnerable women who regret getting into sex work are infinite.

Do you think the availability of porn within an online space has no effect on what kind of culture develops there?

Of course it does have an effect, but there is a difference between “can be found” and “should be encouraged to be treated on equal footing as any other community forum”.

Much like “absolute freedom of speech” platforms that inevitably end up catering to people who want to say only repulsive things without repercussion, what do you think will happen if you create an online space and put a big billboard saying “here you will always be free to share your NSFW content”?

Content discovery of porn should not be as easy and it should not be trivialized under the pretense of “sex positivity”. One can have an absolutely open mind about sex and sexuality while still wanting to keep a clear boundary of when/how/whom to talk about it.

The problem is not code. The problem is that no one wants to take this responsibility. Every one wants to talk about supportive they are on sex positivity until some men in uniform knocks on their doors because they are running a website that is available for minors all around the world.

Also, I don’t even want to get in the discussion of “sex positivity” being associated with “easily available porn”. Like you said, porn is easy to find and I really doubt that the someone who is savvy enough to use Lemmy would have trouble to know where it is.

If this is so important to you, you are still very much free to start your own instance and see how far it goes.

If registration are closed, mods would be exclusively from outside. And, since reports are not federated, this communities would be prone to difficulties for moderation. Unless reports are correctly federated, I don’t think this is a good idea.

It wouldn’t be that difficult to write a little bot that can keep track of each moderator is on each community, and make the report on the instance of the moderator directly.

centralization of domain names under you.

The idea is to have the domains under the control of this collective.

Can you name any advantage??

• Less concerns about political fights among “user” instances affecting communication among communities
• Less tribalism regarding “what community is the canonical one”. Users and admins are of course completely free to create their own communities, but for the majority at large they could just look at the topic-based instance and think “ok, that one will be a good entry point”.
• Less load on all servers. LW has a good chunk of the most active communities, so all activity from other users end up going through that. More instances with cleaner separation => better load balancing.
• Easier content discovery: no matter if users go to a small or big instance, they can be pointed to the different servers to browse according to their interests.

hardly anything huge to really break the inertia or status quo of things as they’re now…

As it is right now, yes. But I am working for a potential future where we can migrate 10, 20, 50 times more users than we already have. Consider that I am also working on a tool to help people migrate from Reddit and in making some modifications on the Voyager app to integrate automatic migration from Reddit to Lemmy. If the gates finally open, this will be very much needed.

My idea would be to have a community request functionality. I am halfway there with fediverser. People can request communities to be created in a given instance, but it still missing the part where members can provide the data (name, description, icon, logo, etc).

Could all of you go outside for a little bit, touch grass, smile at a stranger?

Sometimes I get angry at myself for wasting my time in pointless discussions, but this is next-level wankery. If you know that hexbear is a pig hut, don’t come here to complain that you are full of mud and pig shit in your face.

Reported as off-topic.

Well, surely, but this constraint is there by design. The point of these users is not to attract users, but to have thematic communities that can be followed by users elsewhere on the Fediverse.

benefit your administrative influence from your instances

They are not going to be “my” instances.

acknowledging any objective perspectives.

Oh, I thought it was pretty clear: my objective with these instances have been to build the infrastructure necessary to get people out of Reddit. I want to gain from the growth of the network, where I expect to profit from getting customers on my hosting business.

I don’t need/want to make money out of these instances, I am just commoditizing the complements.

• Your key is your identity. If it’s lost or stolen, you can not revoke it. That alone will make it virtually impossible to be used as an official application protocol for any organization.

• Usability is even worse than anything on ActivityPub

• Moderation is entirely punted to the end user.

• (not technical, but relevant) it is completely dominated by Bitcoin maxis

A type of federation where there is no “home” for a community any more.

This is not federation anymore, but an entirely different architecture. Nostr works like this, but it also has its flaws.

Dear Lord, I had no idea one could be so lost and still be so confident when making an argument.

I am not trying to be mean, it’s just that you are arguing against things that are completely made up.

So instead of one admin being able to take it all down we have multiple

Shared ownership is a policy to prevent single-points-of-failure. Every large-ish instance has multiple admins. This is even a requirement in the Mastodon Covenant: your instance is only listed on the joinmastodon site if the instance has at least two people who can independently access the admin panel.

Could go and notarize shared ownership of a bare metal server I suppose?

You don’t need any of that. As long as the collective has control over the domains and that backups are created and available for everyone, admins could simply move the instance to a new place with a new deployment and a DNS change.

It does not mean that every admin needs to have direct access to the server, and it does not mean that the server will go down if one of them goes rogue. Every minimally competent organization has security processes in place to avoid that.

But we have multiple admins, so these instances would be uniquely able to process very large numbers of users on account of having more than one admin?

I can’t even imagine how you go to this non-sequitur. The idea of having multiple admins is only to ensure that these instances are not under control of a single individual and would not be represent a systemic risk to the overall Fediverse.

If you want communities to be resistant to server removal

Another non-sequitur.

So that even if the original instance is gone, everyone keeps interacting with their local federated community-copy

How is that working out for the communities on feddit.de, and the many other instances that disappeared in the last year? Did you notice they are gone?

In particular because that still doesn’t solve the problem because now you got people able to either moderate each others copy

Another non-sequitur. Are you sure you have a clear understanding of how federation works?

From your response, it seems that you did not read the blog post. The instances are still going to be connected to the Fediverse, the idea is just to keep user registration closed. Users from other instances will continue to be able to follow and interact with it.

Feel free to register a football domain. I will host it for you, free of charge.

I just think that letting people making accounts tied to their favorite topics would get more people interested in joining them.

Could be, but I guess we now just arguing opinions. And given that I am personally hold the opposite view and I don’t want to be be identified by my interests, I am not going to push for something that I fundamentally disagree with.

Please, spare me from the cheap rhetoric.

I’ve been for over an year offering alternatives, attempting to bring actionable proposals to the table, putting resources on the line (go take a look at the matrix room and you may find me telling people that I registered selfhosted.forum and I wanted to give it for free to the /r/selfhosted mods) and every time there is any type of push for concrete effort, I am met with apathy at best and suspicion at worst.

Everyone keeps crying about Zuckerberg/Threads/Venture Capitalists/Spez, but when push comes to shove no one wants to mobilize and put up a proper fight.

It’s tiring and frustrating.