I’m genuinely interested in people thoughts about the Fediverse because here in the UK it has massively stalled in 2025, like a lot of things. I am seeing way less posts from UK people and way less interaction and general use in fact. Most seem to have stopped social media use to be fair, and I know a lot of that is to do with my age (old fart here, 56 laps round sun and counting) but the numbers game look poor from my point of view. Do we think the Fediverse has a future now after useage appears to be going downwards? Is it a UK thing? (well I know the UK is weird but hey)
That’s a bad, short-sighted, wrong answer. We can have decentralized identifiers. We have more than a couple FEPs that deal with portable objects correctly, and in the last FediForum there was a lot proposed strategies to allow migrations from both dead and live servers. None of them requires a server to unilaterally steal the content from another actor and pass it as their own.
People were criticizing me like hell because of the mirror bots on alien.top, but at least the bots were stealing from Reddit and they were meant to get people to migrate. This is implementation from PieFed may have good intentions, but the will lead to bad outcomes.
I don’t think an admin of a server would think that if a community sets up there and operates there that they “own” it, to be honest.
Also, currently, it would only duplicate the content and change how it appears from a Piefed instance.
If you are the admin and developer of the server, you can do pretty much anything with it.
For example, now that I am working on an AP server, I can take all your posts on [email protected] and mirror them on [email protected]. I could also avoid sending notifications to you, so you’d be aware of this only if you visited the site directly. How would you feel about that?
Well currently an admin could easily intervene and stop a migration by removing the community mods, to be fair.
I mean you could just copy my posts anyway manually, if you were so inclined. There wouldn’t be much I could do about it no matter how you did it.
No, no. By mirroring, I mean it is possible to make it look like you posted to the community.
I’d object and probably complain and it’d get your instance blacklisted. I’d support all community migrations being made publicly known - so you can see the timestamps and paper trail of a community.
But this isn’t quite the way that community migration would work here - it’s not quite the same thing. You would be attempting to give the impression I am actively contributing to a community I’m not - whereas I’m talking about moving a community from instance A to B. The community for all intents and purpose is the same.
If I posted actively to a community I do not own or moderate and they moved server and thus took my posts there with them, I wouldn’t really object to that.
You see, this is why it’s important to understand that how ActivityPub works and why we can not think only in terms of “Reddit, but federated”.
In terms of ActivityPub, a community that mirrors posts is exactly the same as someone that “retweets” a message. You may not even have realized, but it’s quite possible that your posts/comments have been replicated on mastodon. Now that they are (finally) adding support for quote-posts, this will be even more common.
What I just described to you is this “communities following communities” idea. It’s not about “giving the impression” of anything, it would be openly to aggregate all content in one single place and to avoid fragmentation.
Now, like I said in the linked discussion, I think that there is a legitimate complaint about taking content from one place and just moving it around. But at least the approach I am proposing is not fabricating anything. It’s Piefed’s implementation that is falsifying information. In my view, what PieFed is doing is objectively worse than a “reposting actor”. Just like the “private voting” feature, it is beneficial for its own users but it’s bad for the overall Fediverse.