Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?
While I somewhat agree with the core of your message I have to say that there should be other types of defederations/ “lock outs”
Defederation fragments whole communities and creates some type of exclusivity when lemmy is suppose to be open and accessible by everyone.
Beehaws reasoning was that they cannot moderate the new influx of members that come from these instances, especially if it’s that easy to sign up on them. My solution to this would be a feature that turns certain instances to read only instead of defederating them.
As for the porn argument, I think that’s kind of unfair to use as an example in the beehaw scenario. Otherwise I completely understand. There’s where the nsfw tagging comes in hand though. If instance owners do not want to serve this kind of content lemmy should offer the option not to cache communities/post that are tagged nsfw. Obviously that feature set does not exist (yet) but lemmy is a fresh product that is constantly updating and changing. I’m hoping these types of changes get added though.