okawari

This doesn’t seem entirely accurate to me.

Most public platforms interacting with the Fediverse today does require you to register an email address out of practical considerations but this is not a requirement of the system in itself. It is possible to both post and read an unmoderated fediverse with enough effort.

If you don’t like the moderation of your particular server, you are fully able to create your own or set up an existing solution yourself that gives you 100% control over what kind of content you post, and in turn which content you federate to your server. Of course, you can’t control which servers decide to allow your content on their server, but any user of servers where your content is blocked can do the same and have access to your content again.

As far as privacy goes, you can rent servers and purchase domains with crypto currencies which are not traceable back to you where you can host your own service that interacts with the fediverse, making you 100% able to control the information you post into it.

A federated system is in a decentralized system too, but I reckon you’re asking about the difference between something that is decentralized in the way Bitcoin or similar systems are, versus the federated software of the Fediverse.

This might be an oversimplification, but the main difference comes mostly down to a philosophy on state and statemanagement.
A decentralized system in the style of Bitcoin and such are a single source of truth decided by consensus of many independent actors(servers) where none of them have any more influence than the other.
However it is important that all actors agree on the entire state of the system, you can’t have an actor that only cares about transcations of exactly 420$ for example.
If some servers have a different view which transactions are true; this is a problem for bitcoin as the system requires a single consensus of whats real to work. (I’m no BC expert, but this should be true on a high level, even if there are practical solutions to this)

On the other hand, a federated systems like on Mastodon are a bunch of independent servers which have their own state(ie posts and what not). They are the ultimate owner of said content, in the sense that that they don’t need approval of any other member in the fediverse to post that content. The decentralized part of the fediverse is obviously the fact that fediverse servers shares its posts with all other servers it knows off, but its not expected behavior that all servers in the fediverse has to have all posts, and the system is not degraded should some posts be missing.

I host a bunch of websites for normal small businesses many of them have contact forms and all of them have captcha.
We’ve seen a steady rise in spam that gets through it over the last year or so. I don’t have any concrete numbers at hand, but we’ve heard from customers that they used to get a few spam replies once in a while before but get 10-20 a day over prolonged periods of time now.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re aproaching a point where computers are better at solving captchas than human.

If you check the sidebar of a magazine, you will see a link to a log of all moderator actions such as deletions and what not.

I’m genuinely not sure, but since ernest shows up as mod on all external magazines, I wouldn’t be surprised if it blocked everything.

In fact, If you go to https://kbin.social/d/kbin.social today, you do see the external posts.

I think you are right for the most part. I assume that some big servers will take most of the users and that the cost of maintaining the fediverse will become quite high in one way or the other as the network grows and the malicious actors gain incentives to interact with the network.

I think the fediverse is more like the old web. I don’t really consider my data very portable, but my ways of consuming and interacting with the content is. I for one don’t really care if my posts go with me if i move somewhere else. If my home server defederates, then I can move to another kbin instance and my experience remains much the same. The monolithic singular identity that I can take with me wherever I go isn’t something the fediverse delivers on right now, but that is fine.

I feel there will at some point be a “this is why we can’t have nice things” moment with ActivityPub and Federation in general.

Karma is probably pretty easy to farm using fake home servers or botted accounts, and other kinds spam is probably going to be an issue if this platform reaches any level of mainstream popularity.

I think many parallels can be drawn between ActivityPub and E-mail, here. E-mail works, but not without a lot of gatekeeping, blocking and spam. Its really hard not to get blocked as a self hosted email server today, you are probably going to be mostly blocked by default until you build somewhat of a reputation for your server, etc. I foresee similar levels of maintenance being needed in the future in order to keep servers federated.

As far as moving your account, some things are easier than others to deal with. Things such as subscriptions and likes is probably a lot easier to move to a new account than entire post histories and such.