Photo of Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Federation is pretty cool, but kinda confusing, and maybe a little scary

· 5 comments · 400 words · Viewed ~670 times.

Last week, this strange mention appeared on my Mastodon feed.

Otome-chan says: "See here. you can see this mastodon user's post (which to them looks like a regular tweet on twitter does) ends up in our random microblogs section. We can also view their profile directly as well as follow them to have their posts appear in our microblogs (as well as threads if they go out of their way to make one). It seems kbin microblogs appear as threads/comments to you on lemmy. so I have to imagine mastodon posts might be similar?"

After a bit of clicking around, I figured out what had happened. A user on the Kbin social network had linked to my Mastodon profile. Thanks to the magic of the ActivityPub protocol, it filtered into my mentions - even though I've never even heard of Kbin. That's pretty cool! A user on one social network can mention a user on a different social network - neither needs to be registered on the other.

And that is where things get a little confusing and, perhaps, a bit scary.

At the moment, users on TikTok and Facebook are completely segregated. If my TikTok video gets shared on Facebook, I have no way of knowing about it. But ActivityPub breaks down those walls.

If my cat photo on Mastodon goes viral, I can start receiving comments from PixelFed telling me how cute my cat is. Lovely!

If I post something on Lemmy saying "I don't think that Trump fellow is entirely my cup of tea", I can start receiving vitriolic comments from a dozen different networks which sprang up in the last week and will vanish tomorrow. Not lovely.

In many ways, this isn't a new problem. Users have always been at risk of abusive people - but that's usually confined to the users of a single network. And most users understand the norms of their social network community. And most networks have ways to combat harassment and limit post visibility.

Because most social networks are walled gardens, the easiest way to share content is via a screenshot. That makes it harder for a user on Facebook to find the Twitter user whose screenshot so offended them. But with ActivityPub there is zero friction. There's no need to share a screenshot when you can embed a post from Network A into Network B with no fuss. Which means with a single click a disgruntled user can slake their ire.

I don't think federation is a bad thing. But I think it's a new way of thinking about your social networking. I like having a different personality and different audience of Facebook and LinkedIn and Reddit and MySpace. And, just sometimes, I want a little bit of friction to stop angry idiots from shouting at me.

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5 thoughts on “Federation is pretty cool, but kinda confusing, and maybe a little scary”

  4. said on mastodon.social:

    @Edent it makes me think at some point, we may have a new default posting visibility setting. Something like “post to my platforms” or “post to my communities”.I’ve already been considering setting my defaults to followers / local for privacy reasons on some accounts. Not sure the general public would be willing to limit that far, though.
    Reply | Reply to original comment on mastodon.social

  5. Antigone Merlin says:

    I cannot help but think this is a symptom of a much larger problem, that the era of big social media has proven to be a failure in the endless shouting match of people who misunderstand each other. Instead, it is alternatives like discord, and reddit which have been gaining ground. Discord is fairly walled and its communities are explicitly designed to be invite-only to even view its messages. Reddit sort of worked because it was a collection of many smaller communities. Despite the fact that the software allows for it, moderators are wary of links to other subreddits, and sometimes solutions like the non-participatory link have to be added in order to explicitly break up these unwelcome connections. On the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast (of all places), I believe it was Karl Friston who mentioned that sparsity is just as important as connections. You don't necessarily want to connect everyone to everything, because that would almost be as useless as a graph with no connections at all. If the Fediverse is to succeed, it has to solve that fundamentally human problem of connecting the right people.
    Reply

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