Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.
There’s a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we’ve had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, ‘tankie-ism’, etc. The subject of the admin’s, and Lemmy dev’s, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.
What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?
To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?
Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don’t really engage with posts about international events, I don’t share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond “Don’t be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can”, and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I’m also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.
What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.
This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.
If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)
I was super into the idea of lemmy.ml and actually had some extensive conversations with them and with lemmygrad when I first joined Lemmy. I didn’t agree with them on practically anything, but whatever, it is fine. Then, lemmy.ml mods started deleting my comments when they decided that I was expressing the incorrect viewpoint and that viewpoint needed to be deleted to clear the way for the correct viewpoint. That’s kind of a red line for me in terms of whether or not I feel like fuckin with a particular instance, and I pretty much turned my back on it.
They take a very Chinese-style approach to managing the internet. Authoritarian.
Some instead do a Russian-style approach. It’s the same thing, but with posts from users critical of Russia.
I wonder if I’m banned from some places and don’t even know lol. I had some casual conversations in these areas too but wasn’t supportive of the alt right bs
Given some of the comments about stuff mysteriously not showing up in the modlog, who knows - but as far as the modlog goes you’ve had one comment deleted, no bans.
Same as me, actually - replied in earnest to a troll a while back. Didn’t know that until today, lol.
First of all, the complaints are not without substance. Some of their admin decisions are highly questionable and obviously politically motivated. However I think the idea of defederation is a huge overreaction.
What do people think about lemmy.ml?
They have always been left-aligned, despite officially being privacy/FOSS focused. This is largely due to the history of Lemmy, which was created by leftist developers and existed in relative obscurity for a couple of years prior to the reddit API exodus a year ago. They have received a good number of relatively apolitical users since the API exodus due to their branding, but many of those users eventually chose to leave to other servers.
These screenshots from 7/16/23 and 9/5/23 show that lemmy.ml experienced a massive bump in users that quickly ebbed away in the following months. This happened with all Lemmy servers, but beehaw and lemmy.ml had the biggest drop offs.
Right now they are sitting right around 2.5k MAUs, same as us.
Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically?
I don’t believe it creates problems for Lemmy users, but I can see the argument for why it does. I think there’s a misconception that lemmy.ml is still the flagship instance or new users are being drawn to them, but I just don’t think that’s the case. People dont really recommend lemmy.ml to new users, because it’s already common knowledge about their political leanings. And they’ve never prioritized promotion of that instance on join-lemmy.org or anywhere else that I’m aware of. This is borne out by the data I just shared, which shows their share of the Lemmy userbase has steadily declined over time.
For sh.itjust.works specifically, I don’t agree that it’s creating problems for our users. Our server has literally grown in the garden planted by lemmy.ml users. We are less dependent on lemmy.ml today than ever before, and now is when people decide they want to defederate? That seems really lame and somehow duplicitous.
I think to the extent that there are problems with the lemmy.ml userbase, they have come more recently after hexbear got defederated from most of the fediverse. I think some long time users on hexbear and lemmygrad who got a taste of the wider fediverse decided to move over to lemmy.ml so they could keep pushing their ideology. That’s not ideal but I don’t think defederation of the whole server is a proper response to a handful of hexbear trolls up to their old tricks.
For me personally as an admin, I can confidently say that I don’t feel like lemmy.ml users have been disproportionately involved in bad behavior or trolling. I’ve removed my fair share of hostile comments in political arguments, but no more offensive or combative than stuff I see from our own users, lemmy.world, lemm.ee, or any big server. I haven’t seen them brigading communities or threads, aside from the ones located on their own server, which is obviously fine.
In terms of their admins, I have to acknowledge that they sometimes make mistakes with moderation. But moderation on Lemmy is also a really difficult task. One important factor is that they host a disproportionate number of communities and especially political communities. Here on SJW, our most active communities tend to be fairly non-controversial. I cannot imagine the moderation burden for active political communities such as those hosted on lemmy.world and lemmy.ml, and I’m thankful they’re doing it instead of us.
TLDR Lemmy.ml is basically alright with me, aside from some minor annoyances. I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them. But that’s just my personal opinion, I will of course abide by the wishes of my fellow sh.it.heads.
It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems. That was the impression that I got - they have their overzealous trolls with their own ideological spin but they don’t have disproportionately more trolls than other instances - but I’m not a mod anywhere so I don’t pay attention as closely.
I think ml does have moderation issues, that post on the technology community is not the first time I’ve seen overly aggressive mod actions from them. I’ve left several news and politics communities on ml due to certain users and moderators creating an environment I prefer not to be in. Being a moderator is a hard job, but I genuinely appreciate the transparency and even-handedness from the mods in other large non-ml communities and they show that we can and should expect better from our community moderators.
I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances, the politics communities already have active alternatives due to the mod issues. The Star Trek communities show this is totally possible, but the non-political communities are the least likely to have issues with overzealous moderators (unless you’re foolish enough to engage in politics elsewhere over there and get a blanket ban from all of ml for bullshit reasons…). But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.
I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.
It’s good to know that ml users aren’t disproportionately causing problems.
Yeah, precisely. It’s a very different situation compared to hexbear, who would flood threads on our server and deliberately try to rile up our users. The problems with lemmy.ml mainly come from users going into their communities and saying things that go against the grain.
If you get banned from lemmy.ml in that situation, I feel like it’s not a bad outcome. Just join the equivalent community somewhere else. Defederating them is almost the equivalent of banning yourself anyway, if you think about it.
I think the post over on Technology has the right idea - move the non-political communities off of ml to other instances […].But a community call to action is harder than a blanket defederation.
I think the moderation issues are more than a minor annoyance, but I agree that defederation, at this point, would be excessive. And I think we’re all happier not addressing the elephant in the room because, well, we wouldn’t be here without them.
Very well said. I completely agree that it behooves us to move a good chunk of communities off lemmy.ml. I think I missed touching on that point in my original comment, thank you for expressing it so well.
The problems with lemmy.ml mainly come from users going into their communities and saying things that go against the grain.
This is overwhelmingly the case from what I have seen.
I think it’s kinda embarrassing to talk about defederating them when none of us would be here without them
Yeah, embarrassing for them
People picked their fediverse option over others. Had Lemmy not been there, we’d all just be elsewhere. They got the popularity, but are clearly actually disliked by a lot of their users. They should probably self-reflect with that knowledge
Sure, but there’s no reason it can’t be both. They caused an issue with their actions, but we can either continue to make the situation worse or begin to repair the damage, depending on how we react.
I had a different reply typed out but I’ve decided to change it because:
This is such a weird reply. It really feels like you’re claiming that people pointing out that abusing mod powers (objectively a thing being done) are somehow in the wrong for doing so just because the people abusing the power are those who coded the site it’s being done on.
The choices users have to deal with an issue like this are to block (per-user, so they have to discuss it), defederation (a big decision, so discussion), or leaving entirely (in which case theyd want others to come with, so discussion). That is unless shaming the people doing it works, but they’ve kinda shown they don’t care as this is far from the first time this has come up.
How is it at all embarrassing for the users of a forum to discuss on said forum one of their few methods of recourse to people with power on that forum abusing it?
It really feels like you’re claiming that people pointing out that abusing mod powers (objectively a thing being done) are somehow in the wrong for doing so
Huh? I never said anything remotely like that. This discussion isn’t about pointing out mod abuse, it’s about potentially defederating lemmy.ml. I support everyone who points out mod abuse, but defederation is a whole other can of worms.
The choices users have to deal with an issue like this
Most users don’t have any issue at all. It’s a vocal minority that antagonize (either deliberately or accidentally) the lemmy.ml users and communities that have been subject to the moderator actions in question.
How is it at all embarrassing for the users of a forum to discuss on said forum one of their few methods of recourse to people with power on that forum abusing it?
It’s not. I said it’s kinda embarrassing, because of the possibility of the discussion actually leading to defederation. If we discuss and decide against defederation, I don’t think it’s embarrassing at all. But if we ultimately defederate lemmy.ml just 12 months after joining Lemmy, I would be slightly embarrassed by that choice, yes.
I would see it as a failure of our ability to solve problems and continue to build Lemmy up, and I don’t think lemmy.ml has done anything egregious enough that we have no choice. So ultimately I would see it as an overly sensitive reaction to a fairly pedestrian internet moderation saga.
This discussion isn’t about pointing out mod abuse, it’s about potentially defederating lemmy.ml.
Because of mod abuse. By ignoring that you’re reframing the whole situation as something else.
Most users don’t have any issue at all
Lol
It’s a vocal minority that antagonize (either deliberately or accidentally) the lemmy.ml users and communities that have been subject to the moderator actions in question.
LOL
So your opinion is based on complete bullshit, gotcha
Gotta chime in here - part of why I made this post was exactly this reason. Apologies in advance for length.
As someone who doesn’t participate in communities where political discussions are the norm, I haven’t had issues with lemmy.ml moderators or users. I know others have, but was uncertain how many other users on this instance experienced this, and if they felt the experience was bad/pressing enough that defederation should be seriously considered.
As a personal aside, so far I’ve seen some very useful perspectives, but not enough evidence to seriously support defederation. The only elements that give me pause are Socsa’s concerns, but even then I don’t think the evidence is rock solid at this stage (though defed or not, warrant further consideration). This is just me though, I can’t speak for anyone else.
I think imaqtpie’s POV is valid, though perhaps not phrased the best way (‘antagonize’ carries some connotations that might be distracting). The problems occur when engaging lemmy.ml on topics their mods are, IMO, overly and inappropriately sensitive about. It usually happens in communities where politically-focused discussion is expected. When this happens, they engage in what can reasonably be described as mod abuse. I think we can agree on that.
Is this problem, and its downstream effects, such that all of lemmy.ml - all users without regard to political affiliations/interests/participation levels/whatever, all communities, etc. - should be cut off from sh.itjust.works entirely? If not, are there other approaches this instance should take to mitigate the problems that exist for its users [e.g. coordinating with other groups to migrate key communities off of .ml and support adoption? Community block lists that folks can use, that are one step below blocking a whole instance? Other things I can’t think of?]
Ultimately, we cannot control how lemmy.ml manages their instance/communities hosted there. What exactly are the problems that causes here, what options are reasonable to address them, and how do users of sh.itjust.works want to deal with that. This is what I was aiming to suss out in opening up this discussion.
Another aside: I see you are based at another instance (which is totally fine, all perspectives are welcome at the discussion stage). First question: Do you guys have a similar governance model to sh.itjust.works, and is defed from .ml under consideration? More important second question: if sh.itjust.works continues to be federated with .ml, would you feel it’s warranted for your instance to defed from us?
Was hoping you’d chime in :)
Just thinking out loud here, but question: Do you know if the current version of Lemmy allows for user-level importation of bulk community block lists (kinda like what you see for ad blockers)? I can’t help but wonder if this is a middle-ground for folks who feel defederation is warranted on the basis of discourse, where the problem may actually lay primarily in specific communities based on the topic of interest.
A group of interested parties could get together, review communities worth blocking based on whatever criteria they come up with, make the list available and users who are interested/aligned with the group’s principles could apply it in one go. Saves the effort of having to engage and block on a case-by-case basis, or blocking whole instances if that feels like overkill.
Not certain I’d use something like this, and it brings its own concerns for consideration, but it seems like a happy medium others could be interested in.
Was hoping you’d chime in :)
You should know by now that I can’t help myself, I like to hear the sound of my own voice 😅
What you’re talking about is really similar to gui.fediseer.com, except that’s on an instance-wide basis. I think it’s a really good idea and seems pretty simple to set up if it’s not already possible.
This particular situation is kind of rare, because typically you’d either want to block the whole instance or just a handful of problem communities. But since lemmy.ml has so many active communities, there are too many bad ones to block manually, and too many good ones to block the whole instance. So yeah, a sharable user-curated community block list would definitely be useful right about now.
It’s a tankie shitshow that I’ve personally blocked because you can’t have unbiased discussions.
Their users are overwhelmingly shitposters or actually believe what they say, which is downright scary. Of all the users I’ve blocked, half of them are from there (the rest about 50:50 between lemmygrad and hexbear).
No pressure, but can you speak to some examples? Are we talking just intense “eat the rich” stuff, or “the gulags didn’t exist, and if they did they were a good thing” level.
Edit: And in your experience was it just individual discussions with users, or getting stuff removed by mods for obvious ideological reasons - and if so was it community-agnostic?
All of it, the “eat the rich” comments are a general leftist-trope that you find on all instances. It was really more like “Russia and China are doing everything right” comments that got a lot of negative feedback that the mods removed and stuff like this, and all across communities.
Often the discussions started rather harmlessly on something broadly political, then you’d have a bunch of people of the “fuck corporates” movement chiming in, and then it derailed real quick into an outright “blame the west for everything” bashing.
Hello,
Any reason to not include the thread that started it all, and has documented abuse from lemmy.ml admins? https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058
Also, if people want to avoid lemmy.ml communities, here is a thread that discusses alternatives: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762
Nope, totally reasonable to add this. I just didn’t bother because it was the top post in All at the time (think it still is this morning).
I definitely think the problems lie with a certain set of individuals within the base, as opposed to the instance as a whole, but it’s a pretty sizable amount. It mostly comes off as a moderate annoyance to me, and not enough to warrant blocking the whole instance, much less defederation.
I will say, however, that the problems seem to be becoming more prevalent. It’s a really annoying situation, as .ml has some of the more popular communities, including the largest meme community, and it would suck to lose those. But at the same time, I’m starting to get really tired of the auth-left bootlicking and one-sided moderation.
It’s no hexbear, not by a long-shot, but it’s definitely becoming an issue.
Personally, I blocked .ml already. Yes, they are a large instance with a lot of legitimate content, but theres such a disproportionate amount of extremism, hate and discrimination, and toxicity that I didn’t find it worth being connected to.
The one hand, it’s important to explore the conversational landscape in order to enrich one’s perspective. I am always interested in calm, composed, respectful discussion of even controversial topics.
On the other hand, echo chambers aren’t really valuable to that end, and lemmy.ml is edging up past that threshold. I feel as if engagement with lemmy.ml users is, more frequently than not, typified by emotional antagonism out of the gate, and only becomes more accusatory and divisive as time goes on.
I had hoped, after all the hexbear nastiness, that lemmy.ml might emerge as the more rational and respectful leftist space. I consider myself a leftist, and I enjoy engaging in polite and nuanced leftist political discussions. But the prevailing sentiment that I personally encounter is the sort of strawman nonsense you’d expect from bad faith actors trying to fracture leftists.
I’m no mod, certainly no admin. I just like having interesting conversations with people on the Internet. I can’t speak directly to censorship or specific logistical problems with Lemmy as a whole, or sh.itjust.works specifically.
All I can say is that I find conversations with lemmy.ml users to be petty and exhausting more often than not, and the writing is on the wall in multiple other instances. This seems like a band-aid rip moment on lemmy at large.
Non-tankie radical leftists tend to be in slrpnk.net and lemmy.dbzer0.com
I really like slrpnk.net, their ecology & climate change communities are really top notch in terms of the well-sourced academic articles they post.
the prevailing sentiment that I personally encounter is the sort of strawman nonsense you’d expect from bad faith actors trying to fracture leftists.
Their goal is to support both/all extremes of the political spectrum in order to divide the CCP’s geopolitics rivals, especially the US.
Divide and conquer in a digital age.
I don’t believe that defederation is necessary nor wise. The complaints about Lemmy.ml that I’ve seen have generally revolved around how they moderate their instance and how communities they host are moderated. If one doesn’t like how they moderate their communities, then one should be the change that they wish to see — start a replacement community, nurture it, and try to make it better than what was seen on lemmy.ml. This is the beauty of the fediverse — you aren’t forced to utilize anything on any other instance. And if one really dislikes seeing lemmy.ml users, then they can even block the instance themself. Lemmy.ml provides a steady, and considerable amount of traffic and content to the Lemmyverse. While that isn’t an argument for continuing to use their communities, it is an argument for why it would be unwise to fragment the network by defederating from them.
The only time that an instance should consider defederating from another, imo, is if it finds that users from other instances are violating the local rules at a rate higher than what is possible, or economically viable to handle via administrative action. It shouldn’t be a simple matter of passive difference in opinion.
In general, I’ve found myself happier and discussions more interesting when I replace a lemmy.ml community wo with one from another instance. When there are two competing communities with similar active users, i’ve found the non-lemmy.ml one to be better by pretty much any metric.
So it does work. Make a better community and users will come.
Hexbear is a instance run by tankies that spread their shit ideology and quash any dissent where they have the power to do so. Lemmy.ml is the exact same, except it’s much bigger and run by the Lemmy devs. I don’t think they should get a pass, and I think that Lemmy will become tankie Voat if this is allowed to continue indefinitely.
I came here because Reddit was being run by corporate scum that only cared about profits, and they crossed too many lines. I thought I could get a new start away from all the mod/admin abuse. I’m starting to realize that basically every instance’s and community’s admins abuse their powers to push their agenda, whether it’s political or trying to maximize membership, to the detriment of their larger userbase.
I don’t think this is a winning fight, even if LML is effectively quarantined, but I’d like to buy time by mass-defederating them.
Well said. The Fediverse has a massive propaganda problem and we should take it head-on if we want to see the Fediverse survive.
The two outcomes I see are:
- We slowly bleed off users until all that remain are tankies, fascists, etc.
- We effectively have two Fediverses, where one is LML, LG, Hexbear, and everyone that wants to allow users and sympathizers from those instances, and the other is everyone else.
Yes, so let’s do #2. I’d enjoy the Fediverse without as much propaganda and negativity, and I’d be thrilled to be able to recommend it to friends.
Yeah, as is I just can’t bring myself to tell people I use lemmy, let alone recommend it. That’s the biggest thing holding lemmy back right now if you ask me
Same. The idea of the Fediverse is incredible, so let’s do it right.
There should be no tolerance for governments (or corporations) pretending to be people and polluting the communities we create. Especially if the government in question is a bunch of murderous authoritarians.
Midwest.social might be another one, though it gets more and more complex b/c they’ve mixed in “leftism” with “being in the midwestern USA”, so a lot of their users and communities there don’t realize what that means, i.e. they think leftism = liberalism as in Bernie Sanders, not = Marxist-Leninist communism except scratch that, outright fascism just using that as a thin veneer to cover their true authoritarianism. And now they hold those users and communities hostage to anyone that would threaten to defederate from them - though they are currently still small(-ish).
Also, you can tell fairly easily when individual users shift over from such an instance to one that is not defederated - the rules they play by on their own instances is one thing, but what they can get away with on other instances is also the very same thing (“my way = the only correct way, and if I have power then I will enforce that, while if you have power than I absolutely dare you to use it”). Hence while defederation solves some issues, it also merely shifts the issues around to have to deal with some other way at some future date… or else as you say we simply allow it to choke the life out of the whole endeavor entirely.
Which is already happening. We who choose to come here tend to forget: there are a whole huge class of people that refuse to use the likes of Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Threads, and even Reddit, b/c they cannot stand “social media”, as it contains such toxicity. Their solution to avoiding such rudeness into their lives is to simply not partake at all. They read books, play games, solve puzzles, touch grass, etc., and since coming to such a place is not fun, they simply… don’t. When I was on Kbin.social, I started recommending the Fediverse to such people irl, b/c it seemed poised to be different than Reddit et al., though now that I have come over to the Lemmy side and experienced firsthand the likes of Chapotraphouse on hexbear.net and anything at all on lemmygrad.ml and now more and more things on lemmy.ml (which I just blocked yesterday), I can no longer in good conscience recommend the Fediverse to people. Like administering your own Linux machine, good experiences can be had, if you put in sufficient effort to curate your experience, but that is not what the vast majority of average people are looking to do.
So we will grow, or we will die. Thus I would be in favor of defederation if that were the only option, though now I think that there are other alternatives to provide a more “opt-in” - rather than mandate an “opt-out” - experience, e.g. as InEnduringGrowStrong suggested elsewhere in this thread, have new user sign-ups automatically block “those” places on the list, and have a bot send them a message about how to remove those blocks if they wish. The site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 is another option to consider heavily - like porn, perhaps we should not be in the business of banning everything, when merely labelling such experiences would be sufficient as to warn users that it is there? (or both:-)
First of all, lemmy.world admins do have history of overreacting (e.g. with piracy & shroom) . So I don’t think we should base our decision on theirs.
I have heard of lemmy.ml users being an issue at some point in the past, but it seem to have settled.
I personally don’t have any issue with lemmy.ml; maybe in the past, but I cannot seem to recall any. What I do know is there are active communities there (Linux comes in mind) and we’d lose all that if we defederate.
I think you would see them a lot more if you frequented threads focused on China, or even adjacently related to China in many cases. They are very heavy on censorship and doing so secretly.
It hasn’t really settled tbh. Any political thread, especially re: Ukraine is full of them
Well of course that’s going go be a hotbed. It is an active war that is essentially being livestreamed. You’ve got a constant stream of combat footage and drone strikes out there with communities celebrating the effective return of watchpeopledie.
Which to me, puts these kinda of threads in a pretty dark context. People be complaining about a FOSS dev being a trans communist while also using that software to mock footage of a conscripts dying scream.
Learning the ml is a shitty place for news and politics is a right of passage for using lemmy. Defederation isn’t the answer, at least not until they do something more than ban people who disagree with them.
This was my only meaningful personal interaction with lemmy.ml that stands out. It was not a good experience. It became very clear, very fast that I would simply have no meaningful discussion with these people. So I left some downvotes on the awful comments promoting violence and stopped engaging.
I haven’t blocked the instance or any users. But i am considering it.
I blocked the instance and my enjoyment of Lemmy has improved.
To be fair to lemmy.ml, that post came from a lemmygrad.ml user. Lemmygrad is worth amputating and blocking wholesale on your account, but lemmy.ml tankies tend to keep their ideology inside their bubble for the most part.
Yup, but they really don’t like someone challenging them on their turf.
IMHO, some of their communities are sketchy, but as long as it’s contained in their communities, that’s easily manageable with just the user-level instance block feature.
Not for a new user who is not aware…
It would be preferable if lemmy.ml were an opt-in feature rather than one that someone has to learn how to opt out of, on top of trying to figure everything else about the Fediverse at the same time.
I am now strongly hesitant to recommend Lemmy to people irl bc of all the heavy mandatory curation that must be done before someone can have a pleasant experience. After accidentally responding to a comment in chapotraphouse, and another in lemmygrad.ml, I almost left the Fediverse entirely rather than put up with the barrage of many tens of responses that continued for weeks despite me not responding to them anymore, and I don’t want people to associate that with me. i.e. it is a bad look for us all when the “we” includes “them”, and it hurts our growth overall. I strongly believe they should have the freedom to be however they want… (even though they do not reciprocate that thought) but that doesn’t mean that I want to help bring new people into their audience for their amusement.
Right, while it technically has a user-level solution, you’re right that a brand new user would simply not know about any of this.
I stumble upon a few now and then when they try and report stuff from there.
So… something like autoblocking the instance on user creation… which might make more sense than outright defederation. A bot could probably be made to do that and send them a DM with instructions on how to change it off they so wish.Thanks for your input
I love that thought!
There is also the site.content_warning rolling out with v0.19.4 to consider - many of the details were not immediately clear to me from that page (is it just images and visiting the community, but what about text-based posts from a community? it says the warning will be delivered the first time a user triggers it, but will a cookie allow that to persist for a user across sessions or need to be re-done each time?), but it does seem a promising avenue to explore.
I liken it to porn - if you enjoy it, then have at it, but at least warn someone prior to it showing up unannounced, or regardless of the fact that it came from elsewhere, people will judge us for having brought it to them. People will ofc complain about being labelled - and fascists will complain the loudest of all (despite their own heavy-handed practices, yet realizing that we actually care about such, it is a tactic that sadly works far more often than it does not) - but honestly it’s just a thing that they could/should do for themselves, akin to how people of consideration will add warning/apology labels for e.g. a long reply to a comment, to let the recipient know that perhaps the read-through may be easier to postpone until a more opportune time for it. And there is nothing preventing them (those people whose content would become labelled) from being included in the process of designing what the precise text of that label would entail? Though if they refuse to participate in good faith then as you suggested, there are ways around dealing with the situation that are just as effective. And maybe the latter solution using tried-and-true methods needs to be done regardless, while the labelling option is still in the experimental stages (especially if the code developers drag their feet making it work in a manner contrary to their philosophy - i.e. they simply remove content that they don’t like, not label it but leave it up, as we are talking about here).
TLDR: opt-in offers maximum friendliness + welcomingness to people and will increase our overall content submissions, whereas out-out turns people away and therefore lowers that.
I did not even know that you were an admin - and would have written a much shorter reply had you not mentioned it - but since you have some ability to influence things for the good of us all, then I thank you for your consideration to actually implement some solution or another to aid with these matters that many of us care so much about: growing & maintaining a healthy Fediverse, even between people with such disparate ideals!:-)
Lemmy.ml is like the PR version of lemmygrad.
Just chiming in to say a lot of communities I participate in are hosted on ml, I’d be pretty bummed losing access to those. For that reason I’m against wholesale defederarion. I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance though, ml admins seem demonstrably untrustworthy.
Late edit: after continuing to interact with their communities over the months, I now believe most everyone on Lemmy.ml instance is either braindead, or acting in bad faith. Their administration is biased, they’ll remove any discussion they don’t agree with as “misinformation”, while their admins actively spread real misinformation and inflame division. Whatever community they’ve fostered is a negative for lemmy, at large.
Defederate and leave them in an echo chamber to rot.
I do think the communities need to explicitly diversify away from the instance
Yeah, I don’t think defederation is warranted yet, but establishing non-ml alternatives for communities which happened to be hosted on ml should be a priority. Blaze posted a thread specifically on this topic: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20431762
