the whole de-federating thing is seriously turning me off to the whole concept of lemmy, it’s like little dictators with their sceptres cutting off entire communities from each other. it’s a major flaw and I hope it gets addressed as lemmy/fediverse evolves, or else it’s not going to work
it’s a major flaw and I hope it gets addressed as lemmy/fediverse evolves, or else it’s not going to work
Defederation is an important tool for admins (e.g. if a server full of nazis appears, we want it to be defederated immediately).
Hopefully admins realise over time it’s stupid to defederate over trivial stuff, and it causes users to revolt and possibly a decline in your server’s activity.
Also, make sure you complain to your admin if they do this, or just leave and go to a new server.
(e.g. if a server full of nazis appears, we want it to be defederated immediately).
This seems obvious to everyone else, but not to me. Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
Authority deciding what you see? You mean like Reddit does? With Lemmy you can always change servers, heck, even set up your own server with your own rules.
Not everyone is required to do so. You just need to find a server that aligns with your values. Communities always censor content, one way or another. Call it moderation. Otherwise, you end up a piling piece of burning trash.
The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
So if one instance is filled with illegal content, the admins of all federated instances must remove it on their instances to avoid law enforcement kicking down their doors.
If there is too much illegal content on one instance to effectively moderate manually, defederation is the solution.
This is beside the fact, that some might have their own additional non-legally mandated requirements for content they host on their platform.
The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
If that’s genuinely the way it works, it seems really dumb.
Fetch data from instances you’re trying to access, rather than hosting everything on all servers. That seems like a quick way to get half the fediverse defederated from each other.
Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
Who would be “dealing with them one by one”? People seem to keep forgetting that lemmy, both the code and the infraatructure, is developed and maintained by hobbyists, not by a company.
I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
You should really think about this, in my opinion, entiteled attitude… You are not the one paying for the server, you are not the one running the server you are certainly not the one who will have to deal with potential legal actions if illegal shit is going on on your instance…
You are not entiteled to any of this… You don’t have to pay in any way for any of it and lemmy admins don’t earn any money from you…
Imagine not only getting into trouble for a hobby, but have random people complain about “authority” because you don’t want to/can’t deal with potentially illegal shit on your server…
If you are so concerned about “authority” and about “what you see on your feed”, start your own server and federate with whoever you want, or start a server that is collectively owned and controlled by it’s users or something like that… You can very very easily do that…
Spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal in some countries… The amount of moderation necessary would be unsustainable. And Nazis tend to propagate violence anyway, which is illegal in most places.
And why is it so important to allow Nazis to “share their views” on your platform anyway? What possible benefit could this bring to a platform?
I’m worried about that.
And every time, they either mention nazis as an excuse, or suggest creating your own instance.
I think fragmentation of users and content is only going to promote centralized platforms.
People have been “worried about that” for the Fediverse for years. It hasn’t stopped it growing.
The main question is “what is the alternative?”. The only alternatives are corporate social media (e.g. Reddit), where you’re even more at the mercy of the admins, or some kind of peer to peer approach which may take off one day, but hasn’t really got going yet.
No one is stopping you from joining a server full of Nazis.
Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel aren’t “just another reasonable point of view that deserves to be heard”
Not contributing to the debate necessarily, I’d just like to take a moment to say:
Tbf, if you don’t like “Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel,” then you’ll want to be on an instance that defederates lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Before the reddit exodus this place was almost entirely genocide denialiasts who support Cuba, China, Russia (incl. the current invasion and simping for the USSR), and who want to literally murder all small business owners and landlords even if they only rent out their spare room or an old townhouse from before they got married for some extra income to help pay for meds in retirement, but no matter, “bourgeoisie.”
The only reason they aren’t so prominent today is the flood drowned them out a bit, they’re still very much here, and they’re no better than the Nazis, and the kicker is they both think they’re the good guys lol.
Edit: Hehe downvotes mean nothing here, but I can see I upset a few of those genocide denialists and that makes me happy.
Everyone here says to run your own server, as if that’s the mindset that’s going to bring in users and increase the popularity of federation. A little short-sighted.
I don’t think the goal is to increase the popularity at the moment. I think it’s manage the chaos. The fediverse has had a massive increase over the past few days and you kind of need to use the emergency tools that are part of federations to manage that growth.
I mean I’m just one person but I’m here to stay and if it shrinks or grows I don’t really care I just know I don’t want to go back to Reddit. I also like the ability to defederate as I’ve seen that reddit has had a long history of allowing bad actors to go untouched because they’ve never broken an actual rule.
Now imagine that chaos, but everyone is running their own server. There are already posts and replies that won’t accept my votes.
Who’s a bad actor? Liberals? Conservatives? Who gets to decide who the bad actor is?
Lemmy needs to allow Server-managers to defederate other servers due to obviously illegal material. And Lemmy needs to allow Users to block or ignore servers just due to any number of reasons. But the decision should be left to the user.
I’m 100% anti-censorship, and if a Server is going to be run that way there needs to be a way for existing users and new users to know that. And that’s the problem because a lot of new users are already stressed at picking a server.
Isn’t that a bit of hyperbole? If it was turning into what you said we’d be seeing a far greater amount of servers than we are.
The point of the fediverse is decentralization. That means if you have a predominant rigid viewpoint you can find an instance that shares that view. I don’t think at the current state of development that the fediverse can have a dominating instance that connects everything. It’s up to you to create a community you feel is missing on the instance you’ve settled in if no other federated instances have that community.
We’ve proven through Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter that we suck at communicating across groups on social media and are more interested in insulting whoever disagrees with us than communicatimg effectively.
That being said the Fediverse is young. Things aren’t perfect. It’s still less censored than almost any other social media platforms aside from 4chan and I’d urge you to use that if you are looking for anti-censorship.
For myself, I’ve picked out a dozen instances and I drift between them all while I figure this out. I treat it just like my half dozen alt accounts I had on RiF.
There’s a big difference between opposing censorship and insisting that private individuals must platform whatever speech you say they should. The difference is so great it is hard to believe you are arguing in good faith.
No, they say that IF you want to have control over what instances yours federates with, then fucking put up, pay for the server, and make those decisions. Otherwise, pay an admin to do it for you, or be happy with what you get.
Why would anyone want to stay connected to a Nazi community, except for the obvious reasons?
Besides that Nazis were just one extreme example, even there you can make the case that not everything people there care about is nazi stuff.
It’s like looking at a specifically Christian instance you wouldn’t expect their users to only ever post or comment about God or Jesus.
Users of such an instance can very well comment on instances like gaming or technology that have nothing to do with their particular instance world view and you wouldn’t know they are nazis and it also wouldn’t matter, instead their comments would benefit the thread just as much as any other comments.
By defederating the instance, you’ll also block interactions like this.
Lets take a tech community on a regular instance as an example. I make a post because I have a problem that needs quick help. Should I care if a person commenting and offering me a solution to my issue could potentially be a nazi because he is a member of Instance that is known for nazis? No because that has nothing to do with the thread. If he can help my with my problem I would want to see his post.
Should I care if a person commenting and offering me a solution to my issue could potentially be a nazi because he is a member of Instance that is known for nazis?
I think it’s generally a good idea to avoid interactions with people who literally want to commit genocide. I’m willing to risk having to wait five minutes longer for assistance with my computer problem.
@Taxxor@Tvkan, No, there are principles that cannot be crossed due to ethics, at least for me it is a no go. There may be contributions that may be of interest, but this does not justify an interaction with Nazis. There are also contributions of interest in other groups, probably even more. If I’m in an instance where I’ve seen Nazi garbage, xeno- or homophobic comments, the next automatic step is to block this instance, I don’t want this shit to appear on my timeline.
Nazis aren’t the point. Censorship is. Hard to see how a community that requires an individual federated server for everyone to avoid censorship is going to eventually come close to the popularity of Reddit.
You seem to be saying that moderation actions should be performed against users, not instances. You’re not getting that instances ARE users. On a network where anyone can create an instance, and then as many accounts on that instance as they like, moderating accounts from a hostile instance is POINTLESS.
What “third party”? There is only one party that decides how their server is run and moderated and that’s the server owner… If you want to see Nazi content, you can go visit the Nazi server, nobody is stopping you from doing that except maybe your government… Nobody should be forced to host Nazi content on their servers against their will…
So go make that choice and host your own instance… What gives you the right to choose how to run an instance you don’t own? I could understand if you have no other choice, but you do have the choice. The code is available for free…
Doesn’t that exactly imply what I said? It’s the same thing, man. You’re trying to play hockey with a lacrosse stick and getting pissed off at lacrosse. Go play hockey if that’s what you’re into, the same rules don’t make sense here.
First, you can opt to follow that instance still, but I don’t know why you would want to hang out with a bunch of Nazis.
Second, I liken it to cutting out a cancerous growth. If you have an instance infested with Nazis and those Nazis are not being stopped due to a lack of admin and/or mods or worse actively being promoted by an admin then defederate them to keep the Nazis from spreading.
Look at the incel and redpill movements that happened on Reddit. Failure to act quick enough helped the movements grow. They were vitriolic to most people but most of them didn’t break any rules. They were destructive in nature and validated misogyny but Reddit didn’t act until it was a very vocal and well established community on its platform. Now, even after closing down their major subreddits, those users who weren’t the most extreme still actively espouse the values of those communities and have created new subreddits.
Or in this case Beehaw has some very progressive ideals, with rules that require a lot more active moderation, they can’t handle the influx of everyone jumping ship from Reddit. Instead of leaving the gate open for people who will ignore the rules it’s better to shut it and open a smaller “apply to join” door creating a protective barrier from individuals that may be Nazis.
In closing, I’ve both been a shitty redditor and seen shitty redditors and I appreciate that the fediverse has tools to decouple and recouple as needed. And again, if you like hanging out with Nazis that instance still exists and you can willingly hang out with Nazis.
I think my “progressive ideals” point covers what you’re saying. Progressivism on the internet has a lot of positive ideas but a lot of authoritarian enforcement if you don’t agree all of the time.
I understand all this but I just don’t personally see it as a problem the same way many others seem to. I constantly read comments I strongly disagree with (for example when discussing this topic) and it’s fine. A racist comment here and there doesn’t bother me much. If it’s written in “good faith” but I disagree with it I’ll either downvote or not engage. If it’s just pure hate with no content I block the user and I don’t need to deal with them ever again. I’m an adult capable of deciding myself what I don’t mind seeing on my feed and what I do. I view it as a kind of a science experiement. I like exposing myself to ideologies even if I strongly disagree with them. I find it interesting when people have a completely different world view to me.
When it comes to stuff that’s illegal it’s a different story. Ofcourse I need to deal with it wether it personally affects me or not.
Also nazis are not the point here. It’s just an extreme example. We could be speaking of flat earthers aswell.
There are also instances made to host spam bots (when they host it themselves they can make as many bots as they want and as fast as they want without having to worry about captcha) and instead of blocking each bot manually, our admins have the option to block that bot instance entirely. That’s a pretty powerful moderation tool.
They may of course also use this to block communities with a different ideology than them to avoid conflict. If you don’t want this, you can join an instance that doesn’t do this (that choice is the cool thing about the fediverse) and you could even host your own instance if you have the know how.
He didn’t say anything about spammers though, just dissenting opinions. Obviously if your instance is filled with 99% spam you ban the spam. Nothing to do with the nazis thing he was talking about.
I think the beauty of federation is that each instance can have it’s own moral code, I figure we will see everything-not-illegal-lemmy.com at some point, without any conmunity except meta ones, with admins that just do not de-federate from anything else.
You can be part of any instance that aligns with your values. And each community can decide which instance to live in. If some community wants to live in an instance which allows everything so anyone can comment, then maybe they move or start their own.
And I don’t think only horrible people would want this. I figure some community like suicide watch might want to allow everyone to comment no matter where they are from. Making de-federation the only option would suck, but it’s not. There can be different bubbles, and bubbles which contain them.
If Nazi content is something you don’t want blocked, then I recommend you find a different instance because not many people will share your values here.
I wrestle with this, I really do. Part of the way forward for me and part of the problem at the same time is finding consistency in the application of principles. I can acknowledge change over time in how I see this issue, but that change could be described as hypocrisy. I know when I first heard about and began to really get into Reddit, I was very much in the let the upvotes decide camp and felt it aligned with my generally liberal even leftist views. To begin to apply caveats to this idea should seem then to be a back step and admission that I don’t fully believe in democratic values or equal rights to beliefs and opinions.
But over time I’ve tried to reconcile this with certain emerging realities. Especially those brought about by the nature of the internet in particular. People will often bring up things like Nazis as their go-to example of why you should embrace moderation and intervention in open forums. It’s a pretty good example because they’re a fairly widely held archetype of an intolerable world view that almost everyone agrees they wouldn’t endorse, which is a useful extreme in any discussion on this topic even if a tired one. But one can always ask, “surely then, these Nazis would be a marginal and irrelevant influence? There’s no need to sacrifice the purity of our dedication to open discussion by intervening to banish such views on internet forums, the users and voting systems will do it, and if they don’t, then maybe it’s what ‘the people’ wanted after all?” Well sure, but this theoretical approach ignores realities such as the mechanisms that will be used to push this fringe and near universally reviled set of ideas to the mainstream fore. The machinery of the internet allows for malicious actors not to just put out their views on a virtual speaker’s corner, but infect and flood a forum and artificially distort it in to basically, a nazi forum. They’re not honest idealists trying to sell their relatively unpopular wares in the market of ideas, they’re walking around pushing everyone else’s stalls over or surreptitiously supplanting their own materials in to everyone else’s shop front. In a more literal sense they’ll use bots, they’ll use alts, they’ll brigade, they’ll insert Nazism in to every topic where it’s not relevant, they’ll organise together and purposefully distort voting for posts by automated means or just by a perverse dedication to poisoning the well by consistently voting on ideology rather than interest. They’ll use open hostility to make a place generally unpleasant enough to be around that there’s a disincentive for anyone except those whose only desire is to promote Nazism, to even bother contributing which will further reinforce the distorted influence of this small but dedicated group of bastards dilligently constructing an echo chamber for themselves and they’ll point to that echo chamber and their outsized influence in it and declare it the will of the people for the relative lack of a counter narrative. They’ll cry foul and rail against censorship when attempts are finally made to curtail them as they simultaneously smother anything like free speech themselves through their continuing degradation of it.
“But can’t we do that? What makes them special? If all it takes is dedication to an ideology shouldn’t we just fight with equal zeal?” maybe, but this takes us back to the purpose of the forum, and of the individual instances too. If, on each visit, your time is dedicated to trying to fight bad faith actors deliberately perverting the discourse from either an explicitly stated topic (for a specialised instance) or just general discussion, then you’re really not getting what you wanted or needed out of that place anymore.
The same applies to something less ideologically loaded but working in a similar fashion, ads, shitposting and astro turfing. Those are things you can be pretty sure you won’t miss and we’re all better off without, but similar to insidious fringe political groups, they will work against your idealistic principles to force themselves in to spaces you’d hoped to carve out apart from their malign influence. They’ll fight dirty and use your tolerant policies to help them proliferate. Unchecked, they completely overrun a comment section, they do it at scale, with automation and strategy and often with backing which gives them staying power and an asymmetric ability compared to administrators and general users alike but technically, they’re just sharing ideas, equally as valid as any other. They, like Nazis will also be probing the weaknesses of administrators, they’ll use techniques that render case by case examination of borderline unacceptable behaviour ineffective and impractical and thereby side step moderation that’s not empowered to deal with them at equal scale.
It is the sad nature of humanity and the internet that such things are predictable and inevitable. It means free speech is ironically something that has to be maintained through seemingly antithetical means, it’s part of why it even exists as a concept, otherwise surely all speech would just be free speech by default and there’d be no point giving it a name. It’s something that despite it’s name actually requires careful balancing to make sure it really is actually free for everyone and that that concept not being abused to effectively amplify the speech of small groups at the expense of everyone else. Knowing all this if you are hosting a discussion platform you have a dilemma, do you choose not to act, in order to preserve the sanctity and purity of your principles and commitment to providing a platform for open discussion; only to watch that platform transform from such in to its very antithesis, or do you actively take steps to make sure your speaker’s corner remains such both in theory and in practice.
Everyone missing the point because the example is “Nazis”. It doesn’t matter what it is, I don’t want someone else deciding what I can see. Unless it causes legal problems for the server, don’t censor me.
Individual servers isn’t the quick answer everyone seems to think it is.
Different instances have different ideologies. You can get a user on “everything-conservative” which blocks half if the federation, or you can get into a free for all instance which allows all. Big generic instances like lemmy.world do have a big problem on their hands, they have to make the bubble the common denominator of all users, which is hard to know.
Eh, if it were easier to block an instance as a user, I’d be 100% with you instead of 95%.
There are instances that are batshit crazy. Since blocking an instance as a user just ain’t possible yet, I can see why defederation before trouble gets going is useful. Once the nasty side of the internet gets snowballing, it’s much harder to manage.
Troll, or serious extremist, some things are just cancerous.
These are good points but apparently it was just a community on that instance… The instance itself wasn’t the problem. You can in fact block a community as a user. People absolutely have the power to block the_Donald community on that instance on their own.
Yeah, admins need the power to block communities for all users on their instance. You don’t want to have a list for new users of “communities you might want to block”. They should be blocked for you, and the list of blocks should be publicly available.
Why can’t people decide for themselves? I don’t get the appeal of someone blocking something for me? A real turn off for me on lemmy so far. I get it for now since the tools aren’t there yet but long term if it continues to be an issue I’d probably have to self host or get out.
They can decide for themselves. They can run their own server or join a server that has few rules (although that server may get defederated by others).
That’s way more freedom than you get on non-federated social media.
It’s freedom in the loosest sense. As in there’s more options. Would it still be freedom if a government makes choices for you? I suppose if I have the means to move to a different country it technically still is. Still distasteful. I don’t know the people that run my instance. Why should I trust them to know what’s best? We’ll see how it shakes out.
Since blocking an instance as a user just ain’t possible yet
I don’t think that would solve the legal issue so it doesn’t really matter in many cases. Even if you personally blocked an instance, your home instance will still recieve copies of that instance as long as someone else is interacting with it. And with that comes the fear of unintentionally hosting something illegal on your instance becasue you have the copies from that other instance.
So again there would be no other solution than defederating.
See, that would be such a better option. Let individual users block servers from appearing for them alone in any interactive sense. The Beehaw defederation was not only terrible timing, but it exposed the biggest achilles heel of this whole idea.
I’m not fully in the know on this by any means, but from what I understand, Beehaw’s admins/mods decided to defederate from sh.itjustwor.ks and lemmy.world because of an inability to moderate effectively due to the massive influx of new Lemmy users last week - most of which were in those two instances, as they have open registration.
How would splitting off fix that problem, though? If 100k users joined beehaw, and they stop syncing with the rest of the federation, they still have 100k new users to moderate.
Or am I looking at this backwards, and they want their gated garden, absent of slugs?
Beehaw would not let 100k users into their platform to start with. They will grow according to their means to moderate. That’s why they only allow sign-ups through application, go bring down the number of new sign-ups and filter by quality.
I think there’s definitely a bit of a gated-garden mentality here, but it’s mostly just being overwhelmed. If they had more help, or had ASKED for more help, it would probably have been much different. I’m new here myself so I’m not going to pretend to understand the nuances here.
The general way I’ve been putting things around federation is that it’s a different kind of friction from corporate big social, and there’s an adjustment period needed for both admins and users.
We’ve kinda gotten used to all living under one big umbrella corporation and tolerating their untouchable shadowy actions, as well as the convenience and relative simplicity that brings.
Federation is more chaos but also more human and flexible. So we get more interpersonal friction and less convenience, but more choice and direct connectivity to the admins. Arguably more accountability or transparency from admins too, but I think that’s the part that needs the most growth largely because many don’t know what that really looks like.
The transition can be tough sometimes. A loss of convenience can make us entitled and drama can be a real turn off. But I think it’s useful to think about how much our tolerance goes down when we can put an identity to an action we don’t like. It’s also useful to think about whether the friction of federation is more like real human interactions and whether that’s healthy.
I’m not a decentralisation fanboy. I tend to be critical of it actually, but I think there are trade offs both ways.
the “problematic” part are the users that join that instance because it’s big but don’t expect them to be like that, because then they have to drop that account and create another in a different instance.
Not even that, it also affects users on other big instances that happen to be defederated by beehaw and with beehaw still hosting some of the biggest tech and gaming communities, users won’t have access to that depending on which other instance they joined.
You’d think the concept of letting users choose their instance would also apply to letting the user choose to block or not. It’s not like the entire instance is full of Donald users, just one crappy part of it.
Tell that to admins with strong opinions, and other admins who don’t wanna anger admins with strong opinions and get defederated for not defederating the offenders.
That’s the part that gets me. Like, I’m all for “it’s your server do what you want,” but I do judge you if your reason for defederating my server is something so stupid as “this other server says they’re bad, so I’ll trust that.”
You fools ain’t never had a friend spread a runor about another friend? Never watched a sitcom? People lie lol, if you’re going to make overarching decisions that affect your users too, you could maybe stand to do a modicum of your own research into it instead of just letting the one you “trust” bully you into compliance simply because this other masto instance doesn’t cater specifically to marxists, and “capitalists are nazis” so they must be banned or else they’ll speak!
My masto server is defederated for being anti trans, yet one of our organizations key members has been a trans woman since 1981 and she’s one of the most prolific posters on the server (and one of the best, I might add). We’re labeled “anti trans” simply because we didn’t defederate with a server that is actually anti trans when the “good guys” tried to bully my admin into it, but the admin respects us enough to allow us to make our own decisions regarding what we want to see or not see on our feed, so of course that suggests to these reactionaries that he wants to somehow exterminate the jewish people.
I’d be more open to it frankly if I wasn’t a direct example of how that system can be and is being abused to create echo chambers and bully those who don’t want to live in them. By all means, your server your right to do so, but my right to think you’re a bad person for it if it’s for silly unresearched reasons such as this. And you might say “they don’t have the time to investigate everything, so they just throw the book at it.” Well, they chose to become admins, they chose that job, maybe managing a public server just isn’t for them, I know I don’t have the time, that’s why I don’t do it.
Yes, just venting my personal grievances with the reacionary culture of the fedi at large. I think the fediverse would be perfect if most of the moderation (regarding cultivating your feed and blocking instances, communities, and users) was placed on the individual, barring outright illegal content like CP, revenge porn, or beastiality which should of course be nuked from orbit and are all actually illegal.
I’d like to see the culture go not from dictator (reddit) to smaller dictators (lemmy), but from dictator (reddit) to anarchism (lemmy, but with more community decision making for themselves as an individual rather than The Council of Beehaw and The Council of Lemmy.world deciding all their peasants are at war with each other.)
Admins are effectively dictators. Some do have anarchistic views such as lemmy.dbzer0.com (and even there, to what extent?). The vast majority only care about themselves and what is theirs. No authority with absolute power will submit themselves to the will of a collective of strangers.
My masto admin still is free to ban people he doesn’t like from his server of course, he just would rather we be able to curate our own feeds, and I’m sure curates his own just the same as we do. He didn’t abdicate the throne I suppose by the nature of being the server owner, and our server is private (exclusive to those in a particular club,) I guess he’s just a benevolent dictator. Still though, I like his approach.
This is why I’m happy to be on my own private instance and part of what really turned me on to Lemmy. It’s trivial to spin up your own instance if you’re technically inclined. You have complete control over what you see and aren’t subject to some power hungry admin on some server like Beehaw. That’s what makes the fediverse so great imo
I was trying to set up my own 0.17.4 instance for a week. I have used docker professionally. 0.17.4 wasn’t trivial to set up. The instructions were full of errors and omissions. I basically had to rewrite the whole docker-compose.yml myself.
Of course, right when I was at the finish line, they released 0.18.0 and rewrote the instructions, and now it gets you 90% of the way right out of the box. There was still one omission to pull an nginx config file, and then you need to get your own certificate and add it to that config file (or use a reverse proxy, but I have no need for that at the moment).
At least it’s much easier than it was 3 days ago.
If I didn’t already have a bunch of shit running in containers that I don’t want to risk messing up, I would have looked into using their Ansible instructions. But I really don’t like running scripts on my server (especially as root!) unless I know everything that it’s doing.
Now that most of the issues are resolved, I would say none of it is really an issue you would need to be a programmer to resolve. More that you would need to have experience setting up websites.
I also set mine up manually. There are a half a dozen or so different scripts that will set it up for you, including an official one here. I generally don’t feel comfortable running scripts on my server, so I avoid this if possible. But if you don’t have anything else on your server that you’re afraid it will fuck up, this is probably the easiest way to do it. You’re basically installing one command line program, on your laptop, then running the script. You’ll just need WSL2 on your laptop, be comfortable with CLI, and know how to git clone a repository. All that stuff can be easily googled.
If creating little islands is the intended way of using lemmy then why bother with federation in the first place? Not to mention that carving up the fediverse robs it of the prospect of at some point replacing big players like reddit.
I mean I’d rather people have freedom over their property (aka their servers) than one entity be able to dictate to the entirety of lemmy.
If I set up a server my instance will have my rules. I won’t allow NSFW nor will I allow any hate speech or promotion of extremist views such as nazism, fascism, imperialism, anything encouraging violence or threats, religious extremist beliefs such as sharia law and fundamental Christianity etc.
I would not federate with any instances that break MY rules. That’s why it’s my instance. I made it, maintain it. My interest isn’t getting as many people on my instance as possible but to give a space for people who want to participate on that kind of instance. Some instances will focus on hating LGBT and being sexist etc and while that’s horrific they’re allowed to do whatever as long as it doesn’t break lemmy TOS which i honestly don’t know what it is.
Anyway, it’s weird to see anyone label freedom to do what one wants with their property as being dictators.
The problem with defederation is that it causes damage to the wider network, and can be far too easily abused.
It makes instance selection very important to the user (which is already a major friction point). And causes terrible UX when users can’t figure out why content is unavailable to them.
It can also be used as a weapon by powerhungry admins to force centralization around their instance.
I know there aren’t really great alternatives to defederation for content moderation right now. But I think that these could easily be implemented. For example, instances could maintain a ‘blocklist’ which users could automatically be subscribed to upon joining, but they would be able to inspect and ‘opt-out’ from blocking certain instances or categories if they desired.
I think this is a good balance of protecting users, and also respecting their freedom.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean they could POST rule breaking content. (They are still users of your instance after all). Just that they would have the choice of which content they feel comfortable with VIEWING.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And defederation is a nuclear powered sledgehammer lol.
there is no “lemmy TOS”. lemmy is only a piece of software that can be ran on a server. it is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL, a copyleft free software license.
this means that pretty much the only legal “terms” you need to abide to run the software on a server is that if you modify it in any way, you have to publish the source code so that others can freely read and modify your version, the way you read and modified the original (this is what copyleft means; it’s the exact opposite of copyright).
the instance owner is the only one providing any “service” here, and as such they decide their terms (the site-wide rules for an instance). if you run your own instance on your own server, you are the only one who can dictate any “terms of service”.
all of this is by design; the fediverse would be pretty useless if anyone could impose a global “terms of service” over it.
There is no lemmy TOS by the way. There is no central authority to all of this. Much like real life, people tend to stay away from the weirdos and in the fediverse they just defederate from a group of weirdos if it becomes too bad.
But to be honest, defederation is an absolutely minor inconvenience. Most important instance will of course cooperate and have similar rules. It’s just that we are on a very young platform right now and the moderation tools are not as advanced as elsewhere. Currently, defederation is just a temporary band-aid solution to make the admin’s lifes easier. It’ll get better and sort itself out over time.
If you like spreading hate, you will of course always have a problem with defederation. You likely won’t be able to participate in normal discussions on normal instances as well as vile portrayals of humanities’ worst with the same account. But that’s not a new concept. People have had two accounts for normal discussion and things like NSFW subs before.
So you would prefer massive dictators with a profit motive instead? Because that’s the alternative you are advocating for.
The entire point of federation as a tool of decentralisation is to address the issue of Spez, Musk, Zuckerberg and so on. Massive corporate dictators of the internet.
The solution is to split up the massive dictators into lots and lots of smaller ones, who can federate with who they want to in order to make a bigger space, and ultimately provide you with the choice of which approach you like better. It ultimatley allows all of these spaces to shut out corporate advertising as well because if McDonalds ever makes a fucking instance everyone will defederate that shit to get away from the advertising immediately.
If you like the mega dictators better. Reddit is over there. I assume you do not, because that’s why you left it.
What I actually DID say is that allowing mods admins to defederate entire communities is stupid. If you want to talk about THAT, fine.
I think you’re really misunderstanding a lot about the fediverse if you think everyone must federate with everyone. Choosing who you federate with is a fundamental part of the design. It means communities can choose their own ways to operate, and we don’t have to apply universal rules to everyone.
If a bunch of nazis want to run a server and post racist shit all day we can’t stop them. But we can (and should) defederate from them. They can have their own private island. If someone wants to run a “safe” server for (e.g) LGBTQI+ and defederate from some of the big instances, they should be able to do it.
If you want to be in a community that allows almost everything except racism, and other horrible shit, and federates with almost all servers then there are plenty of servers that support that. You are free to choose that. That freedom to choose is a massive feature (not flaw) of the fediverse.
You can argue it should be user-level, and again that’s something you can choose. But there will be servers almost everyone wants to defederate from, and don’t want to leave it up to user-level blocking because new users will see horrible shit as soon as they log on for the first time.
Look, you’re absolutely right about pretty much everything you said here. My issue is not exactly with the concept of federation per se, but with the potentially cavalier selection from a top-down level.
The Beehaw situation is really what I mean. At least for the next few months, it seems to me that there will likely be a lot of confusion and frustration over how this all works from new users, and even longtime users will be left wondering whether they need to just keep making new accounts in order to interact with the communities they have history in. C/technology on Beehaw is the de-facto tech community, and it’s now inaccessible to a huge number of users, and for somewhat specious reasons.
I understand the utility of federation and de-federation, but I don’t think it’s being handled well right now.
I agree that BeeHaw defederating seems stupid, and is negatively affecting the growth of Lemmy.
But I think it will sort itself over time in one way or another. Either they will refederate, or they’ll lose popularity and new communities on other servers will overtake theirs.
If a bunch of nazis want to run a server and post racist shit all day we can’t stop them. But we can (and should) defederate from them. They can have their own private island.
And what if they post racist shit all day on their own instance but also post normal and helpful stuff on communities of other instances?
Just don’t visit their communities, that’s it. No need to block potentially helpful posts of members of that instance everywhere.
The same thing when there’s a NSFW and your own instance doesn’t want to see NSFW stuff. That’s fine but it’s not like the users of that NSFW instance are running around posting porn on every other community.
If some of them do, block the users. But there’s no reason defederating the whole instance because those users can and do also participate just fine in other topics that have nothing to do with NSFW or nazi stuff.
For example why should a programmer that has a nazi instance as his home not be allowed to post memes in a community about programming humour from a regular instance, when he doesn’t post anything there that is in any way related to him being a nazi?
So you think that being a nazi automatically means that every view you have on anything is bad by default or that you are not able to participate in any normal conversations that don’t touch that topic, like technology or gaming, without writing racist stuff?
Because that would be the only reason defederation would be justified in my eyes.
In any other case, just don’t visit their home instance.
Yes I do. You’re welcome to find or create instances that do tolerate Nazis. But I think most people want them defederated immediately. Saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to have that option is ridiculous, and technically impossible.
I didn’t say or suggest a single thing you just said.
Of course you did. You said that the defederating thing turns you off the concept of Lemmy, and you advocated for it to be not-a-feature.
You are advocating for centralised mega platforms owned by mega dictators.
The are two options. Centralisation, or decentralisation. That’s it. There is no magic alternative. This is the material reality that exists.
If it turns you off Lemmy, then what you are advocating for is centralisation. The literal polar opposite of what the entire fediverse aims to be and exists to solve. There is not an alternative and there will not be. You either get one owner of a super site or thousands of owners of minisites that federate in order to be emulate a supersite without the oversight. That’s it. There is no third-way.
It’s not criticising flaws in a system, it’s literally asking to dismantle it entirely. You can’t have the fediverse or decentralisation without federation. That’s the issue.
You either have centralisation. Or you have decentralised federation as a means of providing the size that centralised social media can reach without the centralisation part.
The crying about it being a flaw is just people whining about wanting what they’re used to with absolutely no differences. They need to be told to simply get used to it with none of this babying. Their crappy suggestions and complaints are antithetical to the entire goal of fediverse.
All of them will go back to reddit and then find themselves back here in a few years when it’s the content slop machine that they want it to be. They don’t actually care about the goal, they just want slop and are unhappy that their are complications about getting their slop.
thankfully, that isn’t really the case on your (which also happens to be my) instance.
we’ve been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de, for having open signups, which i’m sure is something we could hash out with them in the future. (technically there are also instances that block us which are run by single persons for their own use. in effect, this amounts to a single user blocking us for themselves, which obviously is fine).
we ourselves have defederated from precisely one instance - lemmygrad.ml, the political one for authoritarian communists. this was probably done to avoid unpleasant political spam posts from showing up. personally, i think we could get rid of even this one block as the users can decide whether to block that instance for themselves or not; i might post asking about it later.
we’ve been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de
Which also was my first home instance until I noticed that a comment chain I accidentaly started using another lemmy instance was not visible when looking at the thread though feddit. Not even my own comments made with an instance that wasn’t blocked.
Turns out the user I answered to start that chain was a member of your instance and thus the comment and everything following it was not visible for feddit users.
Which is why I’m a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^
and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues.
That’s the policy of lemm.ee too. It has 34 blocked instances right now but those are all suspicious ones that formed and got >30K users within a couple hours and no activity at all.
But ultimately, new users shouldn’t have to worry about such things, which is why I can’t see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.
Everywhere it says it’s not relevant where you sign up because you can see all the stuff from other instances anyway, but that’s simply not true, it DOES matter where you sign up and even after that you could be forced to change your instance when the defederation roulette starts spinning again.
and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues.
Which is why I’m a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^
aye, that’s the real beauty of the fediverse; every person can find an instance which suits their preferences. those like us can find more hands-off instances if we want to, and equally people who prefer more moderation can easily find a more heavily moderated/curated instance.
But ultimately, new users shouldn’t have to worry about such things, which is why I can’t see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.
maybe an unpopular opinion, but i don’t care so much about lemmy growing. it’s great right now, having achieved a lot of growth recently bringing lots of interesting content and community, but still not being so big to the point where all the disadvantages of a reddit-sized userbase start to show.
hell, maybe it’s better that lemmy never grows as big as the centralized sites, the people who prefer all the advantages of decentralized social media can move here, whereas those who prioritize convenience/ease of use can stay on the big sites. the annoyance of defederations is in some sense just a part of how the protocol works, and not something that can be “solved” per se; the people who are here choose to put up with it in exchange for all the advantages.
one thing that could be done though, is for the lemmy software to have an easy option for migrating all your account data like mastodon does. the poor lemmy devs (literally just 2 dudes) are up to their necks in water just keeping track of the flood in the issues and pull requests right now, so it’s not likely lemmy will get new features soon, but hopefully people will step in to help them as well. if i was good enough at rust (or programming in general) i’d try to help too.
maybe an unpopular opinion, but i don’t care so much about lemmy growing. it’s great right now, having achieved a lot of growth recently bringing lots of interesting content and community, but still not being so big to the point where all the disadvantages of a reddit-sized userbase start to show.
Yeah it doesn’t have to get as big as reddit and I don’t think it ever will, but at least right now I feel my “All” feed doesn’t really change that much within 2-3 days so I’d like a couple more users on here^^
Dumb question, but have you tried changing from “Active” sort type (the default) to “New”? I had the same problem till I found that with lemmy’s size at present, “New” is better at bringing you actually new posts from the past few hours rather than staying the same for days. Though maybe that only works for me because of the number of communities I’m subscribed to. Which is another thing that might help; discovery is a little difficult right now so best to use an external site like https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities that interest you.
I mostly used “Top day” recently, “New” isn’t really good with “All”, more with “Subscribed”.
Browsing lemmyverse.net is useful when I actively want to search for a specific community.
With the current size of Lemmy, I mostly use “All” because I might find interesting stuff from comunities that I didn’t think of before.
It’s not going to get addressed because it can’t be, other than running your own Lemmy instance and just federating with everyone, until the main instances turn off blocklists and instead use allowlists.
I don’t know how any of this works either, but I’m hoping for a solution that makes it harder for owners of large instances throwing their weight around to affect the users so drastically.
Something I can imagine would be the ability to be logged in to multiple accounts at once, so a user could see and interact with multiple unlinked instances seamlessly. Commenting or posting in a community would default to either an account made in that communities instance, or the next available account in a linked instance.
I think this is sort of how it works now, we’re just missing the ability to make the experience seamless.
Sure, it would be possible to program such an app. But in the long run, there will probably be some “main” network of instances that ban gore, hatespeech etc. that will federate as normal. There will also be smaller networks of nasty stuff and if you are into that, you will just need two accounts at most. I can’t see someone who is big on communism enjoy themselves on right-wing circlejerk sublemmys anyways.
Yep, this exact situation is why this whole federation thing is never ever going to catch on as much as Digg and Reddit did. I’m all for a good Reddit alternative but I really don’t think this will be it.
The history of the fediverse has been paved with comments like this. Many thought lemmy would never be as populated as it is right now.
Truth is broad unsubstantiated critiques are easy to make. Constructive criticism harder. Actually trying to make things better even harder.
How much is your critique just “I don’t like a loss of some convenience even if it is the trade off for choice, diversity and non-profit corporatisation of my online social life”?
the whole de-federating thing is seriously turning me off to the whole concept of lemmy, it’s like little dictators with their sceptres cutting off entire communities from each other. it’s a major flaw and I hope it gets addressed as lemmy/fediverse evolves, or else it’s not going to work
Defederation is an important tool for admins (e.g. if a server full of nazis appears, we want it to be defederated immediately).
Hopefully admins realise over time it’s stupid to defederate over trivial stuff, and it causes users to revolt and possibly a decline in your server’s activity.
Also, make sure you complain to your admin if they do this, or just leave and go to a new server.
This seems obvious to everyone else, but not to me. Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
Authority deciding what you see? You mean like Reddit does? With Lemmy you can always change servers, heck, even set up your own server with your own rules.
Yes, exactly like Reddit does. How does a federated system manage when everyone is required to run their own server to avoid censorship?
Not everyone is required to do so. You just need to find a server that aligns with your values. Communities always censor content, one way or another. Call it moderation. Otherwise, you end up a piling piece of burning trash.
our worse, like 4chan
The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
So if one instance is filled with illegal content, the admins of all federated instances must remove it on their instances to avoid law enforcement kicking down their doors.
If there is too much illegal content on one instance to effectively moderate manually, defederation is the solution.
This is beside the fact, that some might have their own additional non-legally mandated requirements for content they host on their platform.
How would you do it?
Fetch data from instances you’re trying to access, rather than hosting everything on all servers. That seems like a quick way to get half the fediverse defederated from each other.
That’s exactly what happens. But you have to store the fetched data on your instance if you want to display it there.
Who would be “dealing with them one by one”? People seem to keep forgetting that lemmy, both the code and the infraatructure, is developed and maintained by hobbyists, not by a company.
You should really think about this, in my opinion, entiteled attitude… You are not the one paying for the server, you are not the one running the server you are certainly not the one who will have to deal with potential legal actions if illegal shit is going on on your instance…
You are not entiteled to any of this… You don’t have to pay in any way for any of it and lemmy admins don’t earn any money from you…
Imagine not only getting into trouble for a hobby, but have random people complain about “authority” because you don’t want to/can’t deal with potentially illegal shit on your server…
If you are so concerned about “authority” and about “what you see on your feed”, start your own server and federate with whoever you want, or start a server that is collectively owned and controlled by it’s users or something like that… You can very very easily do that…
Obviously the admins need to deal with content that’s illegal. I’m not talking about that.
Spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal in some countries… The amount of moderation necessary would be unsustainable. And Nazis tend to propagate violence anyway, which is illegal in most places.
And why is it so important to allow Nazis to “share their views” on your platform anyway? What possible benefit could this bring to a platform?
This whole comment is the reason Lemmy won’t take off
What exactly is the reason? That Nazis are not allowed? You seriously think not allowing Nazis on the platform will kill it?
I’m worried about that. And every time, they either mention nazis as an excuse, or suggest creating your own instance. I think fragmentation of users and content is only going to promote centralized platforms.
People have been “worried about that” for the Fediverse for years. It hasn’t stopped it growing.
The main question is “what is the alternative?”. The only alternatives are corporate social media (e.g. Reddit), where you’re even more at the mercy of the admins, or some kind of peer to peer approach which may take off one day, but hasn’t really got going yet.
No one is stopping you from joining a server full of Nazis.
Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel aren’t “just another reasonable point of view that deserves to be heard”
Not contributing to the debate necessarily, I’d just like to take a moment to say:
Tbf, if you don’t like “Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel,” then you’ll want to be on an instance that defederates lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Before the reddit exodus this place was almost entirely genocide denialiasts who support Cuba, China, Russia (incl. the current invasion and simping for the USSR), and who want to literally murder all small business owners and landlords even if they only rent out their spare room or an old townhouse from before they got married for some extra income to help pay for meds in retirement, but no matter, “bourgeoisie.”
The only reason they aren’t so prominent today is the flood drowned them out a bit, they’re still very much here, and they’re no better than the Nazis, and the kicker is they both think they’re the good guys lol.
Edit: Hehe downvotes mean nothing here, but I can see I upset a few of those genocide denialists and that makes me happy.
Nice to meet another vegan in the wild.
If you don’t want someone to decide who you can connect with, you can spin your own instance. Otherwise every instance has admins that aren’t you
I don’t think that setting up my own instance is as easy as you make it sound to be and that’s besides the point anyways
Everyone here says to run your own server, as if that’s the mindset that’s going to bring in users and increase the popularity of federation. A little short-sighted.
I don’t think the goal is to increase the popularity at the moment. I think it’s manage the chaos. The fediverse has had a massive increase over the past few days and you kind of need to use the emergency tools that are part of federations to manage that growth.
I mean I’m just one person but I’m here to stay and if it shrinks or grows I don’t really care I just know I don’t want to go back to Reddit. I also like the ability to defederate as I’ve seen that reddit has had a long history of allowing bad actors to go untouched because they’ve never broken an actual rule.
Now imagine that chaos, but everyone is running their own server. There are already posts and replies that won’t accept my votes.
Who’s a bad actor? Liberals? Conservatives? Who gets to decide who the bad actor is?
Lemmy needs to allow Server-managers to defederate other servers due to obviously illegal material. And Lemmy needs to allow Users to block or ignore servers just due to any number of reasons. But the decision should be left to the user.
I’m 100% anti-censorship, and if a Server is going to be run that way there needs to be a way for existing users and new users to know that. And that’s the problem because a lot of new users are already stressed at picking a server.
Isn’t that a bit of hyperbole? If it was turning into what you said we’d be seeing a far greater amount of servers than we are.
The point of the fediverse is decentralization. That means if you have a predominant rigid viewpoint you can find an instance that shares that view. I don’t think at the current state of development that the fediverse can have a dominating instance that connects everything. It’s up to you to create a community you feel is missing on the instance you’ve settled in if no other federated instances have that community.
We’ve proven through Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter that we suck at communicating across groups on social media and are more interested in insulting whoever disagrees with us than communicatimg effectively.
That being said the Fediverse is young. Things aren’t perfect. It’s still less censored than almost any other social media platforms aside from 4chan and I’d urge you to use that if you are looking for anti-censorship.
For myself, I’ve picked out a dozen instances and I drift between them all while I figure this out. I treat it just like my half dozen alt accounts I had on RiF.
There’s a big difference between opposing censorship and insisting that private individuals must platform whatever speech you say they should. The difference is so great it is hard to believe you are arguing in good faith.
No, they say that IF you want to have control over what instances yours federates with, then fucking put up, pay for the server, and make those decisions. Otherwise, pay an admin to do it for you, or be happy with what you get.
Why would anyone want to stay connected to a Nazi community, except for the obvious reasons?
Nothing prevents people from just creating new accounts on another instance of lemmy - ban evasion is trivial.
If you’re uncomfortable with this feel free to set up your own server.
Besides that Nazis were just one extreme example, even there you can make the case that not everything people there care about is nazi stuff.
It’s like looking at a specifically Christian instance you wouldn’t expect their users to only ever post or comment about God or Jesus.
Users of such an instance can very well comment on instances like gaming or technology that have nothing to do with their particular instance world view and you wouldn’t know they are nazis and it also wouldn’t matter, instead their comments would benefit the thread just as much as any other comments.
By defederating the instance, you’ll also block interactions like this.
Lets take a tech community on a regular instance as an example. I make a post because I have a problem that needs quick help. Should I care if a person commenting and offering me a solution to my issue could potentially be a nazi because he is a member of Instance that is known for nazis? No because that has nothing to do with the thread. If he can help my with my problem I would want to see his post.
I think it’s generally a good idea to avoid interactions with people who literally want to commit genocide. I’m willing to risk having to wait five minutes longer for assistance with my computer problem.
@Taxxor @Tvkan, No, there are principles that cannot be crossed due to ethics, at least for me it is a no go. There may be contributions that may be of interest, but this does not justify an interaction with Nazis. There are also contributions of interest in other groups, probably even more. If I’m in an instance where I’ve seen Nazi garbage, xeno- or homophobic comments, the next automatic step is to block this instance, I don’t want this shit to appear on my timeline.
Nazis aren’t the point. Censorship is. Hard to see how a community that requires an individual federated server for everyone to avoid censorship is going to eventually come close to the popularity of Reddit.
If reddit had had /r/NationalSocialism and /r/ChildPornography and refused to ban them, I don’t think it would’ve become as popular as it is.
It called them /r/jailbait and /r/the_donald.
And then rightfully
defederatedbanned them.Same with /r/FatPeopleHate - reddit got so much better once they shut that sub down.
Still not the point.
You seem to be saying that moderation actions should be performed against users, not instances. You’re not getting that instances ARE users. On a network where anyone can create an instance, and then as many accounts on that instance as they like, moderating accounts from a hostile instance is POINTLESS.
No, I’m saying I dont want a 3rd party pre-selecting the content I’m allowed to see. I want to make the choices myself
Then make an instance yourself, easy peasy
What “third party”? There is only one party that decides how their server is run and moderated and that’s the server owner… If you want to see Nazi content, you can go visit the Nazi server, nobody is stopping you from doing that except maybe your government… Nobody should be forced to host Nazi content on their servers against their will…
So go make that choice and host your own instance… What gives you the right to choose how to run an instance you don’t own? I could understand if you have no other choice, but you do have the choice. The code is available for free…
Doesn’t that exactly imply what I said? It’s the same thing, man. You’re trying to play hockey with a lacrosse stick and getting pissed off at lacrosse. Go play hockey if that’s what you’re into, the same rules don’t make sense here.
Okay well then I’m saying exactly that
Two things.
First, you can opt to follow that instance still, but I don’t know why you would want to hang out with a bunch of Nazis.
Second, I liken it to cutting out a cancerous growth. If you have an instance infested with Nazis and those Nazis are not being stopped due to a lack of admin and/or mods or worse actively being promoted by an admin then defederate them to keep the Nazis from spreading.
Look at the incel and redpill movements that happened on Reddit. Failure to act quick enough helped the movements grow. They were vitriolic to most people but most of them didn’t break any rules. They were destructive in nature and validated misogyny but Reddit didn’t act until it was a very vocal and well established community on its platform. Now, even after closing down their major subreddits, those users who weren’t the most extreme still actively espouse the values of those communities and have created new subreddits.
Or in this case Beehaw has some very progressive ideals, with rules that require a lot more active moderation, they can’t handle the influx of everyone jumping ship from Reddit. Instead of leaving the gate open for people who will ignore the rules it’s better to shut it and open a smaller “apply to join” door creating a protective barrier from individuals that may be Nazis.
In closing, I’ve both been a shitty redditor and seen shitty redditors and I appreciate that the fediverse has tools to decouple and recouple as needed. And again, if you like hanging out with Nazis that instance still exists and you can willingly hang out with Nazis.
Removed by mod
It’s their server they can do what they want. That’s the beauty of the fediverse. If you don’t like how a server is being run, join another server.
Removed by mod
I think my “progressive ideals” point covers what you’re saying. Progressivism on the internet has a lot of positive ideas but a lot of authoritarian enforcement if you don’t agree all of the time.
I understand all this but I just don’t personally see it as a problem the same way many others seem to. I constantly read comments I strongly disagree with (for example when discussing this topic) and it’s fine. A racist comment here and there doesn’t bother me much. If it’s written in “good faith” but I disagree with it I’ll either downvote or not engage. If it’s just pure hate with no content I block the user and I don’t need to deal with them ever again. I’m an adult capable of deciding myself what I don’t mind seeing on my feed and what I do. I view it as a kind of a science experiement. I like exposing myself to ideologies even if I strongly disagree with them. I find it interesting when people have a completely different world view to me.
When it comes to stuff that’s illegal it’s a different story. Ofcourse I need to deal with it wether it personally affects me or not.
Also nazis are not the point here. It’s just an extreme example. We could be speaking of flat earthers aswell.
There are also instances made to host spam bots (when they host it themselves they can make as many bots as they want and as fast as they want without having to worry about captcha) and instead of blocking each bot manually, our admins have the option to block that bot instance entirely. That’s a pretty powerful moderation tool. They may of course also use this to block communities with a different ideology than them to avoid conflict. If you don’t want this, you can join an instance that doesn’t do this (that choice is the cool thing about the fediverse) and you could even host your own instance if you have the know how.
He didn’t say anything about spammers though, just dissenting opinions. Obviously if your instance is filled with 99% spam you ban the spam. Nothing to do with the nazis thing he was talking about.
I think the beauty of federation is that each instance can have it’s own moral code, I figure we will see everything-not-illegal-lemmy.com at some point, without any conmunity except meta ones, with admins that just do not de-federate from anything else.
You can be part of any instance that aligns with your values. And each community can decide which instance to live in. If some community wants to live in an instance which allows everything so anyone can comment, then maybe they move or start their own.
And I don’t think only horrible people would want this. I figure some community like suicide watch might want to allow everyone to comment no matter where they are from. Making de-federation the only option would suck, but it’s not. There can be different bubbles, and bubbles which contain them.
And when that instance is created, it will get defederated from immediately
If Nazi content is something you don’t want blocked, then I recommend you find a different instance because not many people will share your values here.
I wrestle with this, I really do. Part of the way forward for me and part of the problem at the same time is finding consistency in the application of principles. I can acknowledge change over time in how I see this issue, but that change could be described as hypocrisy. I know when I first heard about and began to really get into Reddit, I was very much in the let the upvotes decide camp and felt it aligned with my generally liberal even leftist views. To begin to apply caveats to this idea should seem then to be a back step and admission that I don’t fully believe in democratic values or equal rights to beliefs and opinions.
But over time I’ve tried to reconcile this with certain emerging realities. Especially those brought about by the nature of the internet in particular. People will often bring up things like Nazis as their go-to example of why you should embrace moderation and intervention in open forums. It’s a pretty good example because they’re a fairly widely held archetype of an intolerable world view that almost everyone agrees they wouldn’t endorse, which is a useful extreme in any discussion on this topic even if a tired one. But one can always ask, “surely then, these Nazis would be a marginal and irrelevant influence? There’s no need to sacrifice the purity of our dedication to open discussion by intervening to banish such views on internet forums, the users and voting systems will do it, and if they don’t, then maybe it’s what ‘the people’ wanted after all?” Well sure, but this theoretical approach ignores realities such as the mechanisms that will be used to push this fringe and near universally reviled set of ideas to the mainstream fore. The machinery of the internet allows for malicious actors not to just put out their views on a virtual speaker’s corner, but infect and flood a forum and artificially distort it in to basically, a nazi forum. They’re not honest idealists trying to sell their relatively unpopular wares in the market of ideas, they’re walking around pushing everyone else’s stalls over or surreptitiously supplanting their own materials in to everyone else’s shop front. In a more literal sense they’ll use bots, they’ll use alts, they’ll brigade, they’ll insert Nazism in to every topic where it’s not relevant, they’ll organise together and purposefully distort voting for posts by automated means or just by a perverse dedication to poisoning the well by consistently voting on ideology rather than interest. They’ll use open hostility to make a place generally unpleasant enough to be around that there’s a disincentive for anyone except those whose only desire is to promote Nazism, to even bother contributing which will further reinforce the distorted influence of this small but dedicated group of bastards dilligently constructing an echo chamber for themselves and they’ll point to that echo chamber and their outsized influence in it and declare it the will of the people for the relative lack of a counter narrative. They’ll cry foul and rail against censorship when attempts are finally made to curtail them as they simultaneously smother anything like free speech themselves through their continuing degradation of it.
“But can’t we do that? What makes them special? If all it takes is dedication to an ideology shouldn’t we just fight with equal zeal?” maybe, but this takes us back to the purpose of the forum, and of the individual instances too. If, on each visit, your time is dedicated to trying to fight bad faith actors deliberately perverting the discourse from either an explicitly stated topic (for a specialised instance) or just general discussion, then you’re really not getting what you wanted or needed out of that place anymore.
The same applies to something less ideologically loaded but working in a similar fashion, ads, shitposting and astro turfing. Those are things you can be pretty sure you won’t miss and we’re all better off without, but similar to insidious fringe political groups, they will work against your idealistic principles to force themselves in to spaces you’d hoped to carve out apart from their malign influence. They’ll fight dirty and use your tolerant policies to help them proliferate. Unchecked, they completely overrun a comment section, they do it at scale, with automation and strategy and often with backing which gives them staying power and an asymmetric ability compared to administrators and general users alike but technically, they’re just sharing ideas, equally as valid as any other. They, like Nazis will also be probing the weaknesses of administrators, they’ll use techniques that render case by case examination of borderline unacceptable behaviour ineffective and impractical and thereby side step moderation that’s not empowered to deal with them at equal scale.
It is the sad nature of humanity and the internet that such things are predictable and inevitable. It means free speech is ironically something that has to be maintained through seemingly antithetical means, it’s part of why it even exists as a concept, otherwise surely all speech would just be free speech by default and there’d be no point giving it a name. It’s something that despite it’s name actually requires careful balancing to make sure it really is actually free for everyone and that that concept not being abused to effectively amplify the speech of small groups at the expense of everyone else. Knowing all this if you are hosting a discussion platform you have a dilemma, do you choose not to act, in order to preserve the sanctity and purity of your principles and commitment to providing a platform for open discussion; only to watch that platform transform from such in to its very antithesis, or do you actively take steps to make sure your speaker’s corner remains such both in theory and in practice.
Everyone missing the point because the example is “Nazis”. It doesn’t matter what it is, I don’t want someone else deciding what I can see. Unless it causes legal problems for the server, don’t censor me.
Individual servers isn’t the quick answer everyone seems to think it is.
Then join a server that federates with everyone no matter what
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Different instances have different ideologies. You can get a user on “everything-conservative” which blocks half if the federation, or you can get into a free for all instance which allows all. Big generic instances like lemmy.world do have a big problem on their hands, they have to make the bubble the common denominator of all users, which is hard to know.
Eh, if it were easier to block an instance as a user, I’d be 100% with you instead of 95%.
There are instances that are batshit crazy. Since blocking an instance as a user just ain’t possible yet, I can see why defederation before trouble gets going is useful. Once the nasty side of the internet gets snowballing, it’s much harder to manage.
Troll, or serious extremist, some things are just cancerous.
These are good points but apparently it was just a community on that instance… The instance itself wasn’t the problem. You can in fact block a community as a user. People absolutely have the power to block the_Donald community on that instance on their own.
Yeah, admins need the power to block communities for all users on their instance. You don’t want to have a list for new users of “communities you might want to block”. They should be blocked for you, and the list of blocks should be publicly available.
or hide communities from All by default, like how reddit hides certain subs from r/all
That’s already possible.
Blocking entire instances is. Not individual communities.
How? I haven’t found a setting for that yet.
Why can’t people decide for themselves? I don’t get the appeal of someone blocking something for me? A real turn off for me on lemmy so far. I get it for now since the tools aren’t there yet but long term if it continues to be an issue I’d probably have to self host or get out.
They can decide for themselves. They can run their own server or join a server that has few rules (although that server may get defederated by others).
That’s way more freedom than you get on non-federated social media.
It’s freedom in the loosest sense. As in there’s more options. Would it still be freedom if a government makes choices for you? I suppose if I have the means to move to a different country it technically still is. Still distasteful. I don’t know the people that run my instance. Why should I trust them to know what’s best? We’ll see how it shakes out.
Because some problems require a hammer and others require orbital nukes…
This is a good point
I don’t think that would solve the legal issue so it doesn’t really matter in many cases. Even if you personally blocked an instance, your home instance will still recieve copies of that instance as long as someone else is interacting with it. And with that comes the fear of unintentionally hosting something illegal on your instance becasue you have the copies from that other instance.
So again there would be no other solution than defederating.
People can block communities right? That might make more sense than just severing connections to other servers completely?
See, that would be such a better option. Let individual users block servers from appearing for them alone in any interactive sense. The Beehaw defederation was not only terrible timing, but it exposed the biggest achilles heel of this whole idea.
Can you elaborate more on this? Its a tangent, but one I’m out of the loop on.
Why DID beehaw split?
I’m not fully in the know on this by any means, but from what I understand, Beehaw’s admins/mods decided to defederate from sh.itjustwor.ks and lemmy.world because of an inability to moderate effectively due to the massive influx of new Lemmy users last week - most of which were in those two instances, as they have open registration.
Beehaw requires you to apply to join.
How would splitting off fix that problem, though? If 100k users joined beehaw, and they stop syncing with the rest of the federation, they still have 100k new users to moderate.
Or am I looking at this backwards, and they want their gated garden, absent of slugs?
Beehaw would not let 100k users into their platform to start with. They will grow according to their means to moderate. That’s why they only allow sign-ups through application, go bring down the number of new sign-ups and filter by quality.
I think there’s definitely a bit of a gated-garden mentality here, but it’s mostly just being overwhelmed. If they had more help, or had ASKED for more help, it would probably have been much different. I’m new here myself so I’m not going to pretend to understand the nuances here.
The general way I’ve been putting things around federation is that it’s a different kind of friction from corporate big social, and there’s an adjustment period needed for both admins and users.
We’ve kinda gotten used to all living under one big umbrella corporation and tolerating their untouchable shadowy actions, as well as the convenience and relative simplicity that brings.
Federation is more chaos but also more human and flexible. So we get more interpersonal friction and less convenience, but more choice and direct connectivity to the admins. Arguably more accountability or transparency from admins too, but I think that’s the part that needs the most growth largely because many don’t know what that really looks like.
The transition can be tough sometimes. A loss of convenience can make us entitled and drama can be a real turn off. But I think it’s useful to think about how much our tolerance goes down when we can put an identity to an action we don’t like. It’s also useful to think about whether the friction of federation is more like real human interactions and whether that’s healthy.
I’m not a decentralisation fanboy. I tend to be critical of it actually, but I think there are trade offs both ways.
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Not even that, it also affects users on other big instances that happen to be defederated by beehaw and with beehaw still hosting some of the biggest tech and gaming communities, users won’t have access to that depending on which other instance they joined.
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I remember mods saying that it was too much work managing the trolls and other “offensive” content so by splitting it was easier for them to control
You’d think the concept of letting users choose their instance would also apply to letting the user choose to block or not. It’s not like the entire instance is full of Donald users, just one crappy part of it.
Tell that to admins with strong opinions, and other admins who don’t wanna anger admins with strong opinions and get defederated for not defederating the offenders.
That’s the part that gets me. Like, I’m all for “it’s your server do what you want,” but I do judge you if your reason for defederating my server is something so stupid as “this other server says they’re bad, so I’ll trust that.”
You fools ain’t never had a friend spread a runor about another friend? Never watched a sitcom? People lie lol, if you’re going to make overarching decisions that affect your users too, you could maybe stand to do a modicum of your own research into it instead of just letting the one you “trust” bully you into compliance simply because this other masto instance doesn’t cater specifically to marxists, and “capitalists are nazis” so they must be banned or else they’ll speak!
My masto server is defederated for being anti trans, yet one of our organizations key members has been a trans woman since 1981 and she’s one of the most prolific posters on the server (and one of the best, I might add). We’re labeled “anti trans” simply because we didn’t defederate with a server that is actually anti trans when the “good guys” tried to bully my admin into it, but the admin respects us enough to allow us to make our own decisions regarding what we want to see or not see on our feed, so of course that suggests to these reactionaries that he wants to somehow exterminate the jewish people.
I’d be more open to it frankly if I wasn’t a direct example of how that system can be and is being abused to create echo chambers and bully those who don’t want to live in them. By all means, your server your right to do so, but my right to think you’re a bad person for it if it’s for silly unresearched reasons such as this. And you might say “they don’t have the time to investigate everything, so they just throw the book at it.” Well, they chose to become admins, they chose that job, maybe managing a public server just isn’t for them, I know I don’t have the time, that’s why I don’t do it.
Completely agree. Admins are free to defederate. Users are free to heavily criticize and leave. That’s how freedom works. 😊
Yes, just venting my personal grievances with the reacionary culture of the fedi at large. I think the fediverse would be perfect if most of the moderation (regarding cultivating your feed and blocking instances, communities, and users) was placed on the individual, barring outright illegal content like CP, revenge porn, or beastiality which should of course be nuked from orbit and are all actually illegal.
I’d like to see the culture go not from dictator (reddit) to smaller dictators (lemmy), but from dictator (reddit) to anarchism (lemmy, but with more community decision making for themselves as an individual rather than The Council of Beehaw and The Council of Lemmy.world deciding all their peasants are at war with each other.)
Admins are effectively dictators. Some do have anarchistic views such as lemmy.dbzer0.com (and even there, to what extent?). The vast majority only care about themselves and what is theirs. No authority with absolute power will submit themselves to the will of a collective of strangers.
My masto admin still is free to ban people he doesn’t like from his server of course, he just would rather we be able to curate our own feeds, and I’m sure curates his own just the same as we do. He didn’t abdicate the throne I suppose by the nature of being the server owner, and our server is private (exclusive to those in a particular club,) I guess he’s just a benevolent dictator. Still though, I like his approach.
This is why I’m happy to be on my own private instance and part of what really turned me on to Lemmy. It’s trivial to spin up your own instance if you’re technically inclined. You have complete control over what you see and aren’t subject to some power hungry admin on some server like Beehaw. That’s what makes the fediverse so great imo
I was trying to set up my own 0.17.4 instance for a week. I have used docker professionally. 0.17.4 wasn’t trivial to set up. The instructions were full of errors and omissions. I basically had to rewrite the whole docker-compose.yml myself.
Of course, right when I was at the finish line, they released 0.18.0 and rewrote the instructions, and now it gets you 90% of the way right out of the box. There was still one omission to pull an nginx config file, and then you need to get your own certificate and add it to that config file (or use a reverse proxy, but I have no need for that at the moment).
At least it’s much easier than it was 3 days ago.
If I didn’t already have a bunch of shit running in containers that I don’t want to risk messing up, I would have looked into using their Ansible instructions. But I really don’t like running scripts on my server (especially as root!) unless I know everything that it’s doing.
Trivial probably wasn’t the best choice of word. I will say the effort was worth it
Sounds painful. Hopefully, you embraced the FOSS mindset and contributed the missing 10% to the docs.
I planned to, but I’m not even sure how. The docs aren’t just a file in the GitHub that I can edit.
Aren’t they? I didn’t check but the docs for my open source stuff are just markdown in the same repository that gets built on release.
Edit: found them
Updated the docs. The change got merged in this morning.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/pull/236/commits/6222f9bf042d7e5421792ee3b80ff24add7e7d20
Nice job :D
Thanks, I’ll give this an update today.
How hard would you say it is for a non-programmer to set up their own instance?
Now that most of the issues are resolved, I would say none of it is really an issue you would need to be a programmer to resolve. More that you would need to have experience setting up websites.
I also set mine up manually. There are a half a dozen or so different scripts that will set it up for you, including an official one here. I generally don’t feel comfortable running scripts on my server, so I avoid this if possible. But if you don’t have anything else on your server that you’re afraid it will fuck up, this is probably the easiest way to do it. You’re basically installing one command line program, on your laptop, then running the script. You’ll just need WSL2 on your laptop, be comfortable with CLI, and know how to git clone a repository. All that stuff can be easily googled.
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If creating little islands is the intended way of using lemmy then why bother with federation in the first place? Not to mention that carving up the fediverse robs it of the prospect of at some point replacing big players like reddit.
I mean I’d rather people have freedom over their property (aka their servers) than one entity be able to dictate to the entirety of lemmy.
If I set up a server my instance will have my rules. I won’t allow NSFW nor will I allow any hate speech or promotion of extremist views such as nazism, fascism, imperialism, anything encouraging violence or threats, religious extremist beliefs such as sharia law and fundamental Christianity etc.
I would not federate with any instances that break MY rules. That’s why it’s my instance. I made it, maintain it. My interest isn’t getting as many people on my instance as possible but to give a space for people who want to participate on that kind of instance. Some instances will focus on hating LGBT and being sexist etc and while that’s horrific they’re allowed to do whatever as long as it doesn’t break lemmy TOS which i honestly don’t know what it is. Anyway, it’s weird to see anyone label freedom to do what one wants with their property as being dictators.
The problem with defederation is that it causes damage to the wider network, and can be far too easily abused.
It makes instance selection very important to the user (which is already a major friction point). And causes terrible UX when users can’t figure out why content is unavailable to them.
It can also be used as a weapon by powerhungry admins to force centralization around their instance.
I know there aren’t really great alternatives to defederation for content moderation right now. But I think that these could easily be implemented. For example, instances could maintain a ‘blocklist’ which users could automatically be subscribed to upon joining, but they would be able to inspect and ‘opt-out’ from blocking certain instances or categories if they desired.
I think this is a good balance of protecting users, and also respecting their freedom.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean they could POST rule breaking content. (They are still users of your instance after all). Just that they would have the choice of which content they feel comfortable with VIEWING.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And defederation is a nuclear powered sledgehammer lol.
there is no “lemmy TOS”. lemmy is only a piece of software that can be ran on a server. it is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL, a copyleft free software license.
this means that pretty much the only legal “terms” you need to abide to run the software on a server is that if you modify it in any way, you have to publish the source code so that others can freely read and modify your version, the way you read and modified the original (this is what copyleft means; it’s the exact opposite of copyright).
the instance owner is the only one providing any “service” here, and as such they decide their terms (the site-wide rules for an instance). if you run your own instance on your own server, you are the only one who can dictate any “terms of service”.
all of this is by design; the fediverse would be pretty useless if anyone could impose a global “terms of service” over it.
There is no lemmy TOS by the way. There is no central authority to all of this. Much like real life, people tend to stay away from the weirdos and in the fediverse they just defederate from a group of weirdos if it becomes too bad.
But to be honest, defederation is an absolutely minor inconvenience. Most important instance will of course cooperate and have similar rules. It’s just that we are on a very young platform right now and the moderation tools are not as advanced as elsewhere. Currently, defederation is just a temporary band-aid solution to make the admin’s lifes easier. It’ll get better and sort itself out over time.
If you like spreading hate, you will of course always have a problem with defederation. You likely won’t be able to participate in normal discussions on normal instances as well as vile portrayals of humanities’ worst with the same account. But that’s not a new concept. People have had two accounts for normal discussion and things like NSFW subs before.
So you would prefer massive dictators with a profit motive instead? Because that’s the alternative you are advocating for.
The entire point of federation as a tool of decentralisation is to address the issue of Spez, Musk, Zuckerberg and so on. Massive corporate dictators of the internet.
The solution is to split up the massive dictators into lots and lots of smaller ones, who can federate with who they want to in order to make a bigger space, and ultimately provide you with the choice of which approach you like better. It ultimatley allows all of these spaces to shut out corporate advertising as well because if McDonalds ever makes a fucking instance everyone will defederate that shit to get away from the advertising immediately.
If you like the mega dictators better. Reddit is over there. I assume you do not, because that’s why you left it.
Don’t show your ass like this. Don’t do the “oh you like waffles so you hate pancakes???” meme. I didn’t say or suggest a single thing you just said.
What I actually DID say is that allowing
modsadmins to defederate entire communities is stupid. If you want to talk about THAT, fine.EDIT: admins, not mods, my mistake, thanks god
I think you’re really misunderstanding a lot about the fediverse if you think everyone must federate with everyone. Choosing who you federate with is a fundamental part of the design. It means communities can choose their own ways to operate, and we don’t have to apply universal rules to everyone.
If a bunch of nazis want to run a server and post racist shit all day we can’t stop them. But we can (and should) defederate from them. They can have their own private island. If someone wants to run a “safe” server for (e.g) LGBTQI+ and defederate from some of the big instances, they should be able to do it.
If you want to be in a community that allows almost everything except racism, and other horrible shit, and federates with almost all servers then there are plenty of servers that support that. You are free to choose that. That freedom to choose is a massive feature (not flaw) of the fediverse.
You can argue it should be user-level, and again that’s something you can choose. But there will be servers almost everyone wants to defederate from, and don’t want to leave it up to user-level blocking because new users will see horrible shit as soon as they log on for the first time.
Look, you’re absolutely right about pretty much everything you said here. My issue is not exactly with the concept of federation per se, but with the potentially cavalier selection from a top-down level.
The Beehaw situation is really what I mean. At least for the next few months, it seems to me that there will likely be a lot of confusion and frustration over how this all works from new users, and even longtime users will be left wondering whether they need to just keep making new accounts in order to interact with the communities they have history in. C/technology on Beehaw is the de-facto tech community, and it’s now inaccessible to a huge number of users, and for somewhat specious reasons.
I understand the utility of federation and de-federation, but I don’t think it’s being handled well right now.
I agree that BeeHaw defederating seems stupid, and is negatively affecting the growth of Lemmy.
But I think it will sort itself over time in one way or another. Either they will refederate, or they’ll lose popularity and new communities on other servers will overtake theirs.
And what if they post racist shit all day on their own instance but also post normal and helpful stuff on communities of other instances? Just don’t visit their communities, that’s it. No need to block potentially helpful posts of members of that instance everywhere.
The same thing when there’s a NSFW and your own instance doesn’t want to see NSFW stuff. That’s fine but it’s not like the users of that NSFW instance are running around posting porn on every other community.
If some of them do, block the users. But there’s no reason defederating the whole instance because those users can and do also participate just fine in other topics that have nothing to do with NSFW or nazi stuff.
For example why should a programmer that has a nazi instance as his home not be allowed to post memes in a community about programming humour from a regular instance, when he doesn’t post anything there that is in any way related to him being a nazi?
“What if the Nazis are actually good people who are misunderstood” is certainly a take
Not what I said, but okay…
So you think that being a nazi automatically means that every view you have on anything is bad by default or that you are not able to participate in any normal conversations that don’t touch that topic, like technology or gaming, without writing racist stuff?
Because that would be the only reason defederation would be justified in my eyes.
In any other case, just don’t visit their home instance.
Yes I do. You’re welcome to find or create instances that do tolerate Nazis. But I think most people want them defederated immediately. Saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to have that option is ridiculous, and technically impossible.
Admins* defederate instances*. Mods only have power inside their /c/ community.
Of course you did. You said that the defederating thing turns you off the concept of Lemmy, and you advocated for it to be not-a-feature.
You are advocating for centralised mega platforms owned by mega dictators.
The are two options. Centralisation, or decentralisation. That’s it. There is no magic alternative. This is the material reality that exists.
If it turns you off Lemmy, then what you are advocating for is centralisation. The literal polar opposite of what the entire fediverse aims to be and exists to solve. There is not an alternative and there will not be. You either get one owner of a super site or thousands of owners of minisites that federate in order to be emulate a supersite without the oversight. That’s it. There is no third-way.
Criticizing and mentioning flaws of a system doesn’t automatically make a person against the system.
Accepting the current flaws and then working on their solutions is the way to make Lemmy better for everyone.
The system IS federation.
It’s not criticising flaws in a system, it’s literally asking to dismantle it entirely. You can’t have the fediverse or decentralisation without federation. That’s the issue.
You either have centralisation. Or you have decentralised federation as a means of providing the size that centralised social media can reach without the centralisation part.
The crying about it being a flaw is just people whining about wanting what they’re used to with absolutely no differences. They need to be told to simply get used to it with none of this babying. Their crappy suggestions and complaints are antithetical to the entire goal of fediverse.
All of them will go back to reddit and then find themselves back here in a few years when it’s the content slop machine that they want it to be. They don’t actually care about the goal, they just want slop and are unhappy that their are complications about getting their slop.
Well this is the design problem in ActivityPub. There are Nostr and OcapPub that are promising to resolve this problem.
You and me both. Presumably a lot of others as well.
Feels like Lemmy is going to shoot itself in the foot with this.
It seems inevitable!
Yep, I feel the same way. Feels like I’m missing out on a bunch of stuff.
thankfully, that isn’t really the case on your (which also happens to be my) instance.
we’ve been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de, for having open signups, which i’m sure is something we could hash out with them in the future. (technically there are also instances that block us which are run by single persons for their own use. in effect, this amounts to a single user blocking us for themselves, which obviously is fine).
we ourselves have defederated from precisely one instance - lemmygrad.ml, the political one for authoritarian communists. this was probably done to avoid unpleasant political spam posts from showing up. personally, i think we could get rid of even this one block as the users can decide whether to block that instance for themselves or not; i might post asking about it later.
and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues. this statement more than anything really made me feel like i chose the right instance.
FMHY for the win!
Which also was my first home instance until I noticed that a comment chain I accidentaly started using another lemmy instance was not visible when looking at the thread though feddit. Not even my own comments made with an instance that wasn’t blocked. Turns out the user I answered to start that chain was a member of your instance and thus the comment and everything following it was not visible for feddit users.
Which is why I’m a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^
That’s the policy of lemm.ee too. It has 34 blocked instances right now but those are all suspicious ones that formed and got >30K users within a couple hours and no activity at all.
But ultimately, new users shouldn’t have to worry about such things, which is why I can’t see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.
Everywhere it says it’s not relevant where you sign up because you can see all the stuff from other instances anyway, but that’s simply not true, it DOES matter where you sign up and even after that you could be forced to change your instance when the defederation roulette starts spinning again.
aye, that’s the real beauty of the fediverse; every person can find an instance which suits their preferences. those like us can find more hands-off instances if we want to, and equally people who prefer more moderation can easily find a more heavily moderated/curated instance.
maybe an unpopular opinion, but i don’t care so much about lemmy growing. it’s great right now, having achieved a lot of growth recently bringing lots of interesting content and community, but still not being so big to the point where all the disadvantages of a reddit-sized userbase start to show.
hell, maybe it’s better that lemmy never grows as big as the centralized sites, the people who prefer all the advantages of decentralized social media can move here, whereas those who prioritize convenience/ease of use can stay on the big sites. the annoyance of defederations is in some sense just a part of how the protocol works, and not something that can be “solved” per se; the people who are here choose to put up with it in exchange for all the advantages.
one thing that could be done though, is for the lemmy software to have an easy option for migrating all your account data like mastodon does. the poor lemmy devs (literally just 2 dudes) are up to their necks in water just keeping track of the flood in the issues and pull requests right now, so it’s not likely lemmy will get new features soon, but hopefully people will step in to help them as well. if i was good enough at rust (or programming in general) i’d try to help too.
Yeah it doesn’t have to get as big as reddit and I don’t think it ever will, but at least right now I feel my “All” feed doesn’t really change that much within 2-3 days so I’d like a couple more users on here^^
Dumb question, but have you tried changing from “Active” sort type (the default) to “New”? I had the same problem till I found that with lemmy’s size at present, “New” is better at bringing you actually new posts from the past few hours rather than staying the same for days. Though maybe that only works for me because of the number of communities I’m subscribed to. Which is another thing that might help; discovery is a little difficult right now so best to use an external site like https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities that interest you.
I mostly used “Top day” recently, “New” isn’t really good with “All”, more with “Subscribed”.
Browsing lemmyverse.net is useful when I actively want to search for a specific community.
With the current size of Lemmy, I mostly use “All” because I might find interesting stuff from comunities that I didn’t think of before.
Fair enough, some more growth would do good
You know you can block all the way down at the IP level, right? Yet somehow the Internet internets.
It’s not going to get addressed because it can’t be, other than running your own Lemmy instance and just federating with everyone, until the main instances turn off blocklists and instead use allowlists.
I don’t know how any of this works either, but I’m hoping for a solution that makes it harder for owners of large instances throwing their weight around to affect the users so drastically.
Something I can imagine would be the ability to be logged in to multiple accounts at once, so a user could see and interact with multiple unlinked instances seamlessly. Commenting or posting in a community would default to either an account made in that communities instance, or the next available account in a linked instance.
I think this is sort of how it works now, we’re just missing the ability to make the experience seamless.
Sure, it would be possible to program such an app. But in the long run, there will probably be some “main” network of instances that ban gore, hatespeech etc. that will federate as normal. There will also be smaller networks of nasty stuff and if you are into that, you will just need two accounts at most. I can’t see someone who is big on communism enjoy themselves on right-wing circlejerk sublemmys anyways.
Yep, this exact situation is why this whole federation thing is never ever going to catch on as much as Digg and Reddit did. I’m all for a good Reddit alternative but I really don’t think this will be it.
The history of the fediverse has been paved with comments like this. Many thought lemmy would never be as populated as it is right now.
Truth is broad unsubstantiated critiques are easy to make. Constructive criticism harder. Actually trying to make things better even harder.
How much is your critique just “I don’t like a loss of some convenience even if it is the trade off for choice, diversity and non-profit corporatisation of my online social life”?