I recently discovered an interesting (and somewhat disappointing, as we’ll find later) fact. It may surprise you to hear that the two most upvoted comments on any Lemmy instance (that I could find at least) are both on Feddit.dk and are quite significantly higher than the next top comments.
The comments in question are:
- This one from @bstix@feddit.dk with a whopping 3661 upvotes.
- This one from @TDCN@feddit.dk with 1481 upvotes.
These upvote counts seems strange when you view them in relation to the post - both of the comments appear in posts that do not even have 300 upvotes.
Furthermore, if you go on any instance other than Feddit.dk and sort for the highest upvoted comments of all time, you will not find these comments (you’ll likely instead find this one from @Plume@lemmy.blahaj.zone).
Indeed, if you view the comments from another instance (here and here), you will see a much more “normal” upvote count: A modest 132 upvotes and a mere 17 upvotes, respectively.
What’s going on?
Well, the answer is Mastodon. Both of these comments somehow did very well in the Mastodon microblogging sphere. I checked my database and indeed, the first one has 3467 upvotes from Mastodon instances and the second one has 1442 upvotes from Mastodon instances.
Notice how both comments, despite being comments on another post, sound quite okay as posts in their own right. A Mastodon user stumbling upon one of these comments could easily assume that it is just another fully independent “toot” (Mastodon’s equivalent of tweet).
Someone from Mastodon must have “boosted” (retweeted) the comments and from there the ball started rolling - more and more people boosted, sharing the comments with their followers and more and more people favorited it. The favorites are Mastodon’s upvote equivalent and this is understood by Lemmy, so the upvote count on Lemmy also goes up.
Okay, so these comments got hugely popular on Mastodon (actually I don’t know if 3.4k upvotes is unusual on Mastodon with their scale but whatever), but why is there this discrepancy between the Lemmy instances then? Why is it only on Feddit.dk that the extra upvotes appear and they don’t appear on other instances?
The reason is the way that Mastodon federates Like objects (upvotes). Like objects are unfortunately only federated to the instance of the user receiving the Like, and that’s where the discrepancy comes from. All the Mastodon instances that upvoted the comments only sent those upvotes directly to Feddit.dk, so no other instances are aware of those upvotes.
This feels disappointing, as it highlights how Lemmy and Mastodon still don’t really function that well together. The idea of a Lemmy post getting big on Mastodon and therefore bigger on Lemmy and thus spreading all over the Fediverse, is unfortunately mostly a fantasy right now. It simply can’t really happen due to the technical way Mastodon and Lemmy function. I’m not sure if there is a way to address this on either side (or if the developers would be willing to do so even if there was).
I personally find Mastodon’s Like sharing mechanism weird - only sharing with the receiving instance means that big instances like mastodon.social have an advantage in “gathering Likes”. When sorting toots based on favorites, bigger instances are able to provide a much better feed for users than smaller instances ever could, simply because they see more of the Likes being given. This feels like something that encourages centralization, which is quite unfortunate I think.
TL;DR: The comments got hugely popular on Mastodon. Mastodon only federates upvotes to the receiving instance so only Feddit.dk has seen the Mastodon upvotes, and other instances are completely unaware.
If you ask me, forums are social media. I think it’s very prescriptive to say that forums should somehow not be supported by a social protocol. I’m not really sure how ActivityPub was designed, but in some ways it feels like they tried to make the protocol too flexible and somehow they managed to make it not flexible enough in other areas, or at least somehow didn’t think to support other use cases very well. It’s unfortunate.
So with this model, when I post to, say !technology@lemmy.world, my own instance would send the post to all the instances that I know of? Or would it send to only those instances following that community (how does my instance know that?)? I think there’s also the problem of how moderation is handled - I mean, how does the community in question enforce bans for example? With the current model, the community is kind of “in control” of everything happening, because it is the one sending out the activities. But if everyone sent them themselves, that seems less clear. What if the community defederates an instance but my instance doesn’t defederate that one - will my instance send the post to the instance that is defederated by the community? It’s all very complicated. I’m not sure what a good solution is.
ActivityPub has been designed as a push-only protocol as push/pull would involve too many web requests. It was designed for designs like Facebook and Twitter. This flexibility made Lemmy possible.
As for sending the post, it’s not that hard to keep track of all servers that follow a group or person or hashtag. Following people is not passive, you send a follow request which usually gets approved automatically.
Bans are already questionable. Servers choose not to forward every message (personal, group, public) to every account. There is no “themselves” in a shared server. Either the entire server gets banned, or the server is trusted to enforce bans. Lemmy federates those bans (though Lemmy and Kbin don’t always communicate right).
I would say “the server publishes a banlist containing *@bad-server.tld”. The defederation list on Lemmy is public anyway, but you could also argue for making such behaviour a setting, and there are probably other/better alternatives.
The way you describe this, it sounds like it would need to work on trust a lot more than it already does. What if there’s a malicious instance actively circumventing bans, ignoring any pulbished banlist?
I was talking about the scenario where you are instance A and you don’t know the followers of a user of instance B. That is not easy to keep track of, since you obviously don’t get any of the follow requests for a user on another instance.
They already exist with the current Lemmy model, unfortunately. Bypassing ban lists isn’t exactly difficult unless the server you’re following does whitelisted federation.
If you don’t know who’s following who, ActivityPub still has
inboxes and othercollections that can contain existing posts for new servers. Server A can add their likes to the appropriate collection and any new servers can fetch that collection at the first follow of that account.