Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
I sort of agree, but I also know that as Lemmy becomes more popular, defederating will become necessary as trolls and hate groups open instances. It’s a problem on Mastodon. A trans friend there posted about her experience bra shopping and a bunch of transphobes from other Mastodon servers came in to attack her, including an admin of one server who called her a slur and told her to stop reporting because they’d never remove anything hateful towards trans people.
On a centralized service like Reddit, hate subs can just be quarantined by the admins or removed wholesale. With a decentralized service, every instance will need to defederate those groups to keep them out. There’s no way to bar them from making a new server.
It’s important to choose your home wisely.
I have an account here on kbin.social, but I also wanted a dedicated lemmy account. I chose fmhy because it aligns with what I want: hearing every voice, for better or for worse. I considered beehaw due to their large gaming community, but I read about their philosophy and saw that they were trying to create more of a safe space for their users (suspicion recently confirmed). If someone wants a more positive experience without having to worry about trolling and harassment, beehaw would be the better choice. I am personally fine with treading through sludge to find hidden gems, so I made my own choice.
Bear in mind that defederation
isn’t bidirectional. If beehaw decides to defederate fmhy, I don’t care, I can still see gaming@beehaw and interact with users that live on instances still federated with my own. But the beehaw users are safe from from troll-friendly hosts, so everybody wins.This isn’t true, as pointed out by zinklog. It can still be worked around by having accounts in multiple places, but even with the eventual account migration feature, this makes it impossible for anyone to see everything in any one place. Maybe this can be fixed in the future, as the fediverse continues to develop?To directly map it to the example of your friend, if she chose to live on an instance more like beehaw, she would still be able to interact with the federated community at large, but be better shielded. If someone tried to throw slurs at her from an instance with a lower standard, she wouldn’t see it at all, and the person delivering the slurs likely wouldn’t even realize it.
Correct me if I’m wrong but it’s my understanding that defederation is in fact bidirectional. lemmy.world can’t see new posts from beehaw after the announcement.
Comment based on this post
You’re right, I’m operating on a flawed understanding of how ActivityPub functions. I was uncertain the post, but the examples comment really makes it clear what the concrete consequences are of defederation. I will edit my post, thanks!
I am still learning lemmy and had no idea that type of situation in your example could work like that. It’s very intriguing.
unfortunately I was wrong, check my edited comment… but I do hope it can work this way in the future. There is no technical reason why a publisher needs to block its subscribers.
I think it’s different with Lemmy since people make posts in communities and it’s in the community moderator’s power to remove problematic comments.
If an entire instance supports or encourages such behaviour though, then you’re right and such instances should be defederated.
And once again what stops the user from blocking them theirselves? People have the ability to block individuals and whole subdomains, why not do it theirselves?
What percentage of people have to be posting hate on a specific topic before a certain server decides to defederate them? I’m in no way advocating hate speech but what happens if you have a large server with just two instances causing trouble? The owner believes in free speech and doesn’t want to block anything but there are dozens of other instances on that server that are behaving normally, with thousands of people using it daily? Do you block that server to your entire user base because of two instances? Do you make all of the other users on that instant suffer because of that? Or do you leave it up to your own users to make their own decisions?
Regardless of how this goes in the end I think the instance operators should have clear and open policies before people decide what servers they want to join to begin with.