Fediverse memes

Good to know.

I'm not sure if this is pushing that, but I personally don't get the "fediverse mods/admins bad, centralised power has no benefit" argument. Like, duh. Of course they have control. That's how we're keeping the CSAM out.

Lemmy/Federated social media is FOSS. Instance admins have direct physical access to their instances. In theory, they can alter them to function however they like.

The deal is this, they keep being BDFLs, or we users replace them by setting up our own instance/community.

The difference between corporate social media, and here, is that none of us can just decide to become a facebook admin. And if we could, no-one could escape our decisions by switching instances.

If you think there's a problem, and aren't prepared to set out and become a fediverse admin yourself in order to solve it, or fork the codebase if you think mod and admin features shouldn't exist, then you're just waiting for someone else to solve these problems.

If you are prepared to run an instance, or create a fork, then you are the solution to the problem you are complaining about.

Fun fact: Piefed developers have baked into the code that their users cannot see any comments, replies or posts from hexbear (probably lemmygrad too) thus undermining the entire point of federation and forcing us to see their slop while being unable to reply or refute their wild claims.

Local admin can literally do whatever the fuck they want. It's up to them what code the instance runs, and it doesn't have to be pure or official lemmy.

So... is this a thing you're thinking shouldn't be the case?

If we were to agree this was a bad power for admins to have, then how, from a technical point of view, would we prevent admins from doing so? There's no real way to prevent an instance admin from, for instance, running a fork of Lemmy that has as a feature, for instance, the ability to prevent a local user from posting on remote instances' communities or a specific remote instance's community (even if the official upstream Lemmy repo developers/maintainers decided to remove that feature).

Theoretically, given that Lemmy is licensed under the AGPL, one could legally demand the source code of any specific Lemmy instance and from that source code obtain proof that it was a fork and what differences might be on that instance relative to the upstream official Lemmy repo.

I guess if I had to come up with another way to prevent a fork from preventing users from posting on remote instances' communities, I might suppose maybe one option would be for Lemmy officially to support logging into your instance 1 account from instance 2's domain. (Might require some OAuth fanciness to allow that without potentially opening up the user to their account being accessed by instance 2 if instance 2 happened to be maliciuos.) And if you did that, you'd be subject to instance 2's rules for being able or not able to post to a given community on instance 2 or instance 3 or whatever. That would undermine instance 1's ability to prevent you from posting on instance 2 or instance 3 or whatever.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you and you're not advocating for anything in particular. Just sharing information.

What is this called - some kind of reverse defederation?