there is a rightwinger instance constantly showing up in my feed and blocking users/communities one by one is getting a bit annoying :/
Reporting isn’t good. I do think users should have an ability to block instances for themselves. (you can do that right now if you run your own instance)
yeah, users need more control, instances need the ability to defederate due to anything crossing legal lines in thier jursdictions, but right now its used for more than that simply because it works well.
users should have control over blocking not just communities but entire instances if they please and meta on posts/communities should be correct so instances can show users SFW public pages for non-members (aka the general public)
Users should absolutely have mute/block/privacy controls. These should be used to build the community they want and see what they want to see.
Users should not be left to “fend for themselves” against abuse/hate/racism having a platform.
A person of color should feel safe.
Women should feel safe.
LGBTQIA+ should feel safe.
BIPOC should feel safe.They should be able to login, find their community and participate without needing to deal with DM’s of lynchings, being publichly shamed with racial slurs. Power belongs to real community and real engagement, not abusers.
Users should not be left to “fend for themselves” against abuse/hate/racism having a platform.
This is precisely the point I’ve been trying to make elsewhere in the thread. Maybe some people want total individual freedom/responsibility to block or not, but most of us want to find an instance community that will protect us and serve our interests by dealing with that for us, so we don’t have to go through that mental health damage constantly.
The good thing is you can always run a tiny instance for just yourself and not defederate with anyone if other communities defederate too aggressively.
im sure it would need some tweaks to how sync works but i think its completely possible for every user that wanted to have thier own instance, running right on thier phone if they desired.
I can already imagine a few ways that can go wrong. This would be a awesome way to do it though but there are many issues that would have to be addressed for that.
same, but its not like its something that hasent been worked on intensely for the past 15 years or anything, using mechanisms that require a level of consensus we dont need the overhead of meaning higher throughput. We also dont have the read only write-forward problems that those systems have so we can simply leverage the very well refined P2P mechanisms they use, i bet if we go looking, we find one that has its p2p protocol implementation in its own github even.
the thrust here is rather than diy, lets leverage work where billions have already been sunk.
p2p makes sense in this situation. It can end up being a massive battery drainer if we are talking smartphone implementation. (coming from torrenting reference point and how it eats battery on phones)
so the way these work usually is 2 piece like old IRC away daemons. You have a headless instance that syncs what you care about on “someone elses computer” or just online all the time. That does the job of keeping up-to-date. Your phone and other devices do a secure connection to that device to get updates. what’s interesting about building it to just be the same kind of server is you can simplify deployment and apps (its all the rage anyway just look at a react app).
so your device does not need to be online, you could run things like bots and have schedules and get just the deltas when you come online. This is also how private signing works today so the design and deploy pattern is well documented.
Let me guess: exploding heads?
yeah
Yeah, that was my guess. I just blocked them individually and that solved it. I wonder if they’re the only user on that instance.
You should discuss it with your own instance admins.
The best solution is de-federating their connection to that instance but it is done for everyone on an instance so it’s not a small decision.
This is just so far as I understand, I may be very wrong on how this works.
defederation should be kept to a minimum and saved for big offenders only. I think best option is for lemmy to have an option to hide posts from some instances on a per user basis.
I agree with this. Everyone keeps saying that it doesn’t matter which instance you sign up with, since everything is federated. But my biggest concern is thriving communities potentially getting cut off from the rest of the fediverse because they unluckily got created on an instance that has a bad reputation for something completely unrelated. Allowing users to individually hide entire instances for themselves seems like the better approach.
Lemmygrad? A lot of instances ban it, message the admins directly
While I understand your wanting to ban such a community, I think moving away from that type of action is a good thing. It’s all about personal freedom. I have some instances blocked already but I would never decide to do that for everyone because what gives me that right? Speak out against them. Make your views know. Denounce, Rage, never quit. But never censor. Freedom of information and choice is the end goal. Banning a topic is what leads to radicals because they have no outlet for their insanity.
Nonsense, their outlet is staying on the shithole instances, not forcing the rest of the world to see it.
I feel like the recent history of the world proves this not to be true
By “ban” they mean defederate from. They’re not banning an instance from the Fediverse, the instance that’s defederating from the other one is just choosing not to interact with or have to see them anymore. So your rhetoric here is misapplied, because one instance defederating from another isn’t silencing the latter for anyone else but the instance that made that choice. It’s not analogous to restricting freedom of information or personal freedom at all, on fact it’s precisely an exercise of personal freedom: freedom of association! It’s more equivalent to just leaving a club and never coming back or hanging out around them anymore. Yes, it’s done on the whole instance’s behalf, so it effects more than just one person, but thats why random instance members can’t defederate an instance they don’t run from another instance, there’s a decision procedure to make sure it represents the wishes of the instance as a whole.
Semantics. If you defederate an instance, in this case lemmy.world blocks the instance /c/(hate group), you make the decision for everyone on that instance (you being the owner), on who can see what. This will create pockets of many little hubs instead of one big decentralized mesh network. This comes right back to the “owner” of the instance controlling everything that the user can see. I understand someone is paying the bills and that moderation is going to be needed. This is of course going to come down to choice. Is there a way to view each instances block list? If not it should be implemented into the back end somewhere, once again to allow freedom of choice.
What decision procedures are in place to stop rogue instance owners from making unilateral decisions? I admit I’m very new to lemmy and activitypub as a whole. If the community as a whole can weight in on the decision, then by all means, go ahead. 100% fair and I agree with you. I’m just against any type of actions being made by small groups of individuals that are “for the good of everyone”. I really don’t have an agenda here. I just want the freedom of choice for everyone. I’m tired of living in a world where there are people who think they know whats best for everyone else.
Thank you for your time to respond. Regards.
I just want the freedom of choice for everyone. I’m tired of living in a world where there are people who think they know whats best for everyone else.
I hear you <3 I think we share the same goals, and might even agree on our ideal world (the best solution IMO would be to let users individually defederate from instances as a first line of defense and then have instances defederate from each other after the community approves of it only as a last line of defense). But I think practically speaking, there are places I disagree with you.
(Also, I apologize for the length of this comment, but I think we are in the early days of something extremely important with these federated and decentralized networks, and hashing out the culture and pros and cons and technical features of these things is really important to do carefully and intentionally to lay the groundwork.)
I think being able to defederate from hate groups and rogue instances is a very important feature of the network, because it allows communities to avoid other hostile communities instead of being forced into one giant, common, one-size-fits-all compromise social sphere where they are forced to coexist with communities who hate them or even want them dead.
A lack of this ability was one half of the problem with corporate social media, the other being that to solve this they had to use centralized moderation that, when banning a user, utterly banished them, instead if just separating two groups but allowing them to remain in a common network and have indirect connections, as in Lemmy.
Mods on one instance aren’t able to moderate the comments and posts of people on other instances, so the only way for them to properly deal with users and communities that consistently refuse to moderate their own members is to defederate. If there’s no way to defederate, there’s no way for communities to essentially moderate their interactions with other communities, so if a group wants to do a mass harassment campaign against e.g. trans people or black people, all they need to do is start an instance where they’ll never actually be banned or muted or have their comments removed, and they can then harass people on other instances with complete impunity, consequence-free, with the harassed people having no recourse but to individually choose to block the harassing instance.
Preventing that sort of mess where everyone has to fend for themselves with personal blocklists is the whole reason mods were invented in the first place, to be a first line of defense for everyone else, so we don’t have to deal with hate and nonsense constantly. They’re essentially a community defense organization. It would make lemmy basically unusable for marginalized people who face a ton of hate and harassment and this information and concerning directed at them to be left completely to their own devices on this front. Yes, they may be a somewhat centralized locus of power, but would you object to moderators doing their other functions such as banning or muting users, removing comments, etc too? Because this is very much in line with those things.
Anyway, independent of what the mechanisms are for deciding when to defederate, I think you have to look at the cost/benefit analysis, instead of just declaring it bad, and I have personally experienced the benefits. Many Mastodon instances regularly defederate from many other Mastodon instances, and yet that network has not turned into anything like what you fear, and I’ve directly felt the benefits of such defederation as certain never ending sources of problems and hate are effectively quarantined from the people that don’t want to deal with them.
Moreover your assumption that allowing defederation will cause a degenerate network condition is verging on a slippery slope argument. Defederation will never be widespread enough to turn the Fediverse into just an array of mostly centralized hubs like corpo social media because it’s a very extreme move you only do to cesspools of hate and fascism, so the network will just be a decentralized mesh network that isn’t completely directly connected, which might be a small sacrifice in some abstract metric, but has direct benefits in making communities more liveable for people that aren’t okay with being on something like 4chan.
Now to answer your main point. The decision to defederate one instance from another is the decision of the instance’s owner(s), and so may be unilateral in that sense, yes, but thanks to the overall interconnectedness of the network, unless your current instance literally defederates from ALL other instances, if the mods on an instance do something you don’t like, you’ll always be able to find or make a new instance that is connected to all the people on the old instance and all the instances you disagreed about the blocking of. That’s the most crucial aspect of the federated network — freedom of association and freedom from network effects. That freedom of association means there’s competition between instances (and little barrier to entry for making new ones or switching), which will incentivize mods to implement collective decision-making such as polls. Additionally, most instances have a mission statement or description of the attitudes and goals of the instance and so it can be assumed that if people join that instance then they agree for the most part with that ethos and so as long as the mods act in line with that then it’s fine.
Is there a way to view each instances block list? If not it should be implemented into the back end somewhere, once again to allow freedom of choice.
Also this is a really great idea, maybe you should make an issue requesting that feature on the Lemmy github!!
Already a thing as far as I know. For example lemmy.world federation/block list.
In regards to your question about viewing instances block lists, I believe you can actually, assuming that other instances are the same as the one I’m on in that regard. At the bottom of the home page for my instance, I see among other things a link that says “instances”, which when clicked brings up a page with a list of federated instances and a list of blocked ones.
I think that the way to deal with one’s instance defederating from an instance who’s content you value is to move to another instance. Admittedly some tool to move one’s subscriptions to a new account would be helpful with this, but ultimately, this sort of thing is part of the point of a federated network, instances should be ideally small enough that one can be at least somewhat familiar with the admins, and so can leave if they don’t fit you.
I don’t think defederating an instance that one’s instance as a whole finds distasteful is a bad thing though. Maybe if it was a decision that was very unpopular with one’s userbase or something it could be a problem, but in general, it seems preferable to having to just put up with people you’d rather not be around/talk to, while still letting them have their space to themselves. People have the right to talk to eachother. But they are not entitled to talk to you specifically, when you do not wish to listen to them
I know, I was just telling him how he would tell them. It is very important for people to know how to report something
It’s not censoring, they can still go and subscribe to something even if it’s defederated afaik. It’s just not shown by default, which sounds like a great idea for instance owners that want to protect their users or curate the overall atmosphere. Or they just create an account there if they disagree with the decision.
I 100% agree that it’s the owners choice if he decides to block content. But as far as I know if a instance is defederated and the instance owner doesn’t publish a block list, users on the server would have no idea it existed in the first place.
There are already a couple of search engines that show instances. Maybe if some of the developers could add categories so people could find things they are interested in. This could be a useful tool for building communities. As long as it’s an uncensored database of indexes I think this would be great. If you know one that is indexing instances by category please post it.
I’m sure instances will post guidelines and rules once they get everything straightened out. I’m just a strong advocate for personal choice. Once again I understand why some people want moderation and I understand eventually it may well be needed for some communities. As long as the owners are open about this that’s fine, but not all operators are going to be transparent with these policies.
I agree. A bad opinion/agenda that is denounced with logical reasoning and compassion will do far greater good than simply censoring. The potential future followers of that bad opinion/agenda would maybe be swayed by a superior view point if they saw the majority of comments were opposed to it.
Dealing with a bad opinion is vastly different than platforming hate, abuse, or racist turds. These people who perpetuate this don’t have any logic or reasoning to debate and defederation isn’t censorship, it’s healthy.
I thought it was generally somewhat studied that we’re already at a point where correcting bad actors isn’t enough anymore, as they can spread much faster than humanity has resources to be on top of it with right information. Deplatorming seems to be the currently suggested praxis.
What study?
Let’s hope someone remembers more!
no, not lemmygrad
You can limit yourself to Local, which will only show you communities from your own instance.
Also, when you see a clear case of someone acting in a shitty manner you can report them. This report doesn’t just go to the community’s mods. It also goes to all the admins of all instances involved (your and their accounts’, and the community’s instance) as well as to the top admins. But be warned that it’s not anonymous (your username appears in the report).
You can also open a discussion with the admins and users of your instance. Your admins can block other instances, but that will apply to all users of your instance.
I’d suggest just to be patient though. Usually fascist instances tend to get banned and defederated.
Or you can find an instance that is already defederated from the problematic one.
Removed by mod
