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I hereby name thee Chaosbringer
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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the whole de-federating thing is seriously turning me off to the whole concept of lemmy, it's like little dictators with their sceptres cutting off entire communities from each other. it's a major flaw and I hope it gets addressed as lemmy/fediverse evolves, or else it's not going to work
This is why I'm happy to be on my own private instance and part of what really turned me on to Lemmy. It's trivial to spin up your own instance if you're technically inclined. You have complete control over what you see and aren't subject to some power hungry admin on some server like Beehaw. That's what makes the fediverse so great imo
Defederation is an important tool for admins (e.g. if a server full of nazis appears, we want it to be defederated immediately).
Hopefully admins realise over time it's stupid to defederate over trivial stuff, and it causes users to revolt and possibly a decline in your server's activity.
Also, make sure you complain to your admin if they do this, or just leave and go to a new server.
This seems obvious to everyone else, but not to me. Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
I'm extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
Why would anyone want to stay connected to a Nazi community, except for the obvious reasons?
Nothing prevents people from just creating new accounts on another instance of lemmy - ban evasion is trivial.
If you're uncomfortable with this feel free to set up your own server.
No one is stopping you from joining a server full of Nazis.
Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel aren't "just another reasonable point of view that deserves to be heard"
If Nazi content is something you don't want blocked, then I recommend you find a different instance because not many people will share your values here.
The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
So if one instance is filled with illegal content, the admins of all federated instances must remove it on their instances to avoid law enforcement kicking down their doors.
If there is too much illegal content on one instance to effectively moderate manually, defederation is the solution.
This is beside the fact, that some might have their own additional non-legally mandated requirements for content they host on their platform.
Who would be "dealing with them one by one"? People seem to keep forgetting that lemmy, both the code and the infraatructure, is developed and maintained by hobbyists, not by a company.
You should really think about this, in my opinion, entiteled attitude.. You are not the one paying for the server, you are not the one running the server you are certainly not the one who will have to deal with potential legal actions if illegal shit is going on on your instance..
You are not entiteled to any of this.. You don't have to pay in any way for any of it and lemmy admins don't earn any money from you..
Imagine not only getting into trouble for a hobby, but have random people complain about "authority" because you don't want to/can't deal with potentially illegal shit on your server..
If you are so concerned about "authority" and about "what you see on your feed", start your own server and federate with whoever you want, or start a server that is collectively owned and controlled by it's users or something like that.. You can very very easily do that..
Obviously the admins need to deal with content that's illegal. I'm not talking about that.
Spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal in some countries.. The amount of moderation necessary would be unsustainable. And Nazis tend to propagate violence anyway, which is illegal in most places.
And why is it so important to allow Nazis to "share their views" on your platform anyway? What possible benefit could this bring to a platform?
Authority deciding what you see? You mean like Reddit does? With Lemmy you can always change servers, heck, even set up your own server with your own rules.
If you don't want someone to decide who you can connect with, you can spin your own instance. Otherwise every instance has admins that aren't you
You seem to be saying that moderation actions should be performed against users, not instances. You're not getting that instances ARE users. On a network where anyone can create an instance, and then as many accounts on that instance as they like, moderating accounts from a hostile instance is POINTLESS.
So you would prefer massive dictators with a profit motive instead? Because that's the alternative you are advocating for.
The entire point of federation as a tool of decentralisation is to address the issue of Spez, Musk, Zuckerberg and so on. Massive corporate dictators of the internet.
The solution is to split up the massive dictators into lots and lots of smaller ones, who can federate with who they want to in order to make a bigger space, and ultimately provide you with the choice of which approach you like better. It ultimatley allows all of these spaces to shut out corporate advertising as well because if McDonalds ever makes a fucking instance everyone will defederate that shit to get away from the advertising immediately.
If you like the mega dictators better. Reddit is over there. I assume you do not, because that's why you left it.
Eh, if it were easier to block an instance as a user, I'd be 100% with you instead of 95%.
There are instances that are batshit crazy. Since blocking an instance as a user just ain't possible yet, I can see why defederation before trouble gets going is useful. Once the nasty side of the internet gets snowballing, it's much harder to manage.
Troll, or serious extremist, some things are just cancerous.
This is a good point
Yep, I feel the same way. Feels like I'm missing out on a bunch of stuff.
thankfully, that isn't really the case on your (which also happens to be my) instance.
we've been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de, for having open signups, which i'm sure is something we could hash out with them in the future. (technically there are also instances that block us which are run by single persons for their own use. in effect, this amounts to a single user blocking us for themselves, which obviously is fine).
we ourselves have defederated from precisely one instance - lemmygrad.ml, the political one for authoritarian communists. this was probably done to avoid unpleasant political spam posts from showing up. personally, i think we could get rid of even this one block as the users can decide whether to block that instance for themselves or not; i might post asking about it later.
and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues. this statement more than anything really made me feel like i chose the right instance.
FMHY for the win!
Which also was my first home instance until I noticed that a comment chain I accidentaly started using another lemmy instance was not visible when looking at the thread though feddit. Not even my own comments made with an instance that wasn't blocked. Turns out the user I answered to start that chain was a member of your instance and thus the comment and everything following it was not visible for feddit users.
Which is why I'm a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^
That's the policy of lemm.ee too. It has 34 blocked instances right now but those are all suspicious ones that formed and got >30K users within a couple hours and no activity at all.
But ultimately, new users shouldn't have to worry about such things, which is why I can't see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.
Everywhere it says it's not relevant where you sign up because you can see all the stuff from other instances anyway, but that's simply not true, it DOES matter where you sign up and even after that you could be forced to change your instance when the defederation roulette starts spinning again.
You and me both. Presumably a lot of others as well.
Feels like Lemmy is going to shoot itself in the foot with this.
People can block communities right? That might make more sense than just severing connections to other servers completely?
Tell that to admins with strong opinions, and other admins who don't wanna anger admins with strong opinions and get defederated for not defederating the offenders.
See, that would be such a better option. Let individual users block servers from appearing for them alone in any interactive sense. The Beehaw defederation was not only terrible timing, but it exposed the biggest achilles heel of this whole idea.
Can you elaborate more on this? Its a tangent, but one I'm out of the loop on.
Why DID beehaw split?
I'm not fully in the know on this by any means, but from what I understand, Beehaw's admins/mods decided to defederate from sh.itjustwor.ks and lemmy.world because of an inability to moderate effectively due to the massive influx of new Lemmy users last week - most of which were in those two instances, as they have open registration.
Beehaw requires you to apply to join.
How would splitting off fix that problem, though? If 100k users joined beehaw, and they stop syncing with the rest of the federation, they still have 100k new users to moderate.
Or am I looking at this backwards, and they want their gated garden, absent of slugs?
I think there's definitely a bit of a gated-garden mentality here, but it's mostly just being overwhelmed. If they had more help, or had ASKED for more help, it would probably have been much different. I'm new here myself so I'm not going to pretend to understand the nuances here.
Beehaw would not let 100k users into their platform to start with. They will grow according to their means to moderate. That's why they only allow sign-ups through application, go bring down the number of new sign-ups and filter by quality.
I mean I'd rather people have freedom over their property (aka their servers) than one entity be able to dictate to the entirety of lemmy.
If I set up a server my instance will have my rules. I won't allow NSFW nor will I allow any hate speech or promotion of extremist views such as nazism, fascism, imperialism, anything encouraging violence or threats, religious extremist beliefs such as sharia law and fundamental Christianity etc.
I would not federate with any instances that break MY rules. That's why it's my instance. I made it, maintain it. My interest isn't getting as many people on my instance as possible but to give a space for people who want to participate on that kind of instance. Some instances will focus on hating LGBT and being sexist etc and while that's horrific they're allowed to do whatever as long as it doesn't break lemmy TOS which i honestly don't know what it is. Anyway, it's weird to see anyone label freedom to do what one wants with their property as being dictators.
There is no lemmy TOS by the way. There is no central authority to all of this. Much like real life, people tend to stay away from the weirdos and in the fediverse they just defederate from a group of weirdos if it becomes too bad.
But to be honest, defederation is an absolutely minor inconvenience. Most important instance will of course cooperate and have similar rules. It's just that we are on a very young platform right now and the moderation tools are not as advanced as elsewhere. Currently, defederation is just a temporary band-aid solution to make the admin's lifes easier. It'll get better and sort itself out over time.
If you like spreading hate, you will of course always have a problem with defederation. You likely won't be able to participate in normal discussions on normal instances as well as vile portrayals of humanities' worst with the same account. But that's not a new concept. People have had two accounts for normal discussion and things like NSFW subs before.