submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by problematicconsumer@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you're suggesting? Do you get what's the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?

This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.

If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it's just natural that people tend to use it. I won't use it, you may not use it and it's totally fine! It's about having options. Also as Mastodon's CEO pointed out there's no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.

Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I'm not against defederation in general. It's a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.

If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.

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[-] Kichae@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media

Do you?

It certainly doesn't mean "everything from everywhere can reside on the server I pay for". Nor does it mean "we can't vote them off the island if they're negatively impacting us".

It means exactly the opposite, in fact. It means we get to say "no" at whatever level we choose, and that includes at the server level.

If you don't like the choices the admins on your server make, find a new one, or start your own. That is the promise of federation.

[-] problematicconsumer@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

Totally get your point. But I think this notion of I'm paying, so I will decide what you can do is not a good mindset. If you've started a general instance with tens of thousand of users, you have a responsibility, no one forced you to do this. And with no easy option to migrate accounts, yes this is authoritarian.

[-] wasp@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

The foundation of free speech is that you cannot force someone to say something they do not want to. This is a lot more foundational than the "you can say what you want" aspect of free speech. You can't force someone to agree with you, you can't force someone to publish or say something in their name, you can't force someone to host content on their website.

Similarly, you can't force an owner of a Lemmy instance to host or say something they don't want to. If an owner said "you know what, I don't want to host this" or "I don't want to federate with X" then you can disagree with them sure, but you can't force them to say/do something they don't want to.

Whether this is or isn't authoritarian, the alternative is that someone can force a Lemmy owner to host things they don't want in their server. Imagine if some really repugnant communities showed up on your instance and you couldn't remove them. Now that really would be authoritarianism - it's removing your freedom to choose what you say... Just because someone can say something, doesn't mean you as an owner/individual have to listen to it, like it, agree with it, or host it.

The big free instances are running off of good will, they don't owe you anything, they certainly don't owe your view a voice unconditionally. If you don't like it, especially with Lemmy, you can set up your own instance/club and say and not say what you like.

[-] problematicconsumer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Did anyone talk about forcing instance owners or any other person to do or say something they don't want?!

Sorry but I think you have not even read the post. I'm talking about all these negativity towards other instances from average users in here. If and instance owner decides to defederate of course I might disagree but there's not much I can do about it, specially if they can present reasons.

If anyone can prove that some other Instance is harmful it's just natural that it should be defederated (in most cases)

Again. My issue is talking nonsense about oh that company is trying to destroy us whilst in reality they have hundreds of millions of users and are gaining more each second and we're sitting here circle jerking about our nice little community.

I say we should be open to new experiments. I am not saying defederation is bad, I am not saying instance owners should be forced to do anything