I think the way federation currently works spells doom for the fediverse, should any service of it get major traction. Currently, if you subscribe to a community on Lemmy or follow a user on Mastodon, your instance will pull the content of that instance/user and make it available for all to see and interact with. What seems like a good idea to spread content however is becomming the achilles heel of the fediverse: The admins of Lemmy/Mastodon instances are liable in many juristictions for the content their servers are distributing. This means in practice that many Lemmy/Mastodon instances block NSFW content for example, as the admins, understandably so, are either unwilling or incapable of making sure they are not running afoul of any laws.
As such, I think that the fediverse needs to offer a way for users to follow content from other instances without having that content be stored, let alone shared by their home instances.
A question I have at this point is where this criticism is best levied against. Is it the job of Lemmy/Mastodon to provide such a form of federation, or does the ActivityPub protocol needs to be ammended?
That is not a proper solution. Especially when Fediverse applications are becoming mainstream, most users won’t switch instances to access content they currently are unable to. It will just lead to endless support tickets and -threads on why they can’t find what they are looking for. Also, for people that rely on exposure, such a fracturing of the Fediverse is just not worth it. Furthermore, having to restrict access to content in order to cover yourself legally leads to self-imposed censorship worse than even big platforms, like reddit, currently demand.
You bring up legitimate concerns, but I think the bigger point here is that the Fediverse is not Reddit, nor should it be. I find that fragmentation mitigates the system manipulation and “gaming” that is often tied to people who rely on exposure.
There are people out there that arent OF ‘creators’ or nefarious people that rely on exposure. The dev that created Stardew Valley all on his own for example. I have spoken with some creators, who will, despite everything, stay with twitter, simply because Mastodon is too fragmented and the chance to be seen is too low.
I’ve heard the argument that ‘lemmy is not reddit’ a few times and it is aleays used to defend the objectively bad way federation currently works. Server admins have to defederate, lest their servers automatically pull content they could be sued for for distributing. That is just bad design, flat out.
It’s not bad design though. What it does is make users, like you and myself responsible for our user experience. If you want a server that allows everything find one, if you want a conservative one, find one. If content creators want to join the server with the biggest reach in order to peddle their wares, fuck them. The fediverse is about communication not validation. It’s why so many companies find themselves defederated on mastodon before they get started. Your mindset is that numbers equal success and everything should be just like it was, but mastodon doesn’t want to be Twitter and Lemmy doesn’t want to be Reddit. In the same way that those two companies are flushing their services down the toilet, the fediverse protects against that by leaning into the idea that once it’s on the Internet, it’s there forever. There’s nothing wrong with expecting users to form relationships of trust with their admins and taking responsiblity for how that manifests
Server admins having to disable the very thing that makes the fediverse the fediverse to shield themselves from liability is by definition bad design.