@lisko@sopuli.xyz’s comment is not visible at all on the Lemmy instance while to me my comment is not visible at all on the Beehaw instance, nothing is showing in modlog though so I assume it has not been removed.
Am I unaware of a mechanic of federation occurring here? Or is something bugged?
Right but as I said down here, that feels bad.
It’s inherently confusing. You think you’re posting to a “community” not to a copy of a post from a different community on another community, with the potential for any replies to that copy to be a completely and utterly pointless waste of time because they won’t actually be seen outside your own instance as the other instance has silently defederated you as an individual for actions you performed completely outside their instance in a completely different one.
This is functionally much worse than reddit. It’s quite difficult for an educated tech-literate person to wrap their head around, not impossible but it’s still quite mind-bending. If that’s the case it will be VERY confusing and impenetrable behaviour for a person less literate in these things. I don’t know about whether you’ve done much reddit modding nutomic, I don’t know much about you, but I do know Dessalines has because I’ve shared modteams with them and this mechanic is VERY abuseable by any instances that want to weaponise.
It’s quite noticeable in the small ecosystem when this stuff is occurring, with modlogs that don’t have many actions. That will not be the case in a larger federation of many instances. The larger the federation the more dangerous many of these mechanics become. The ability this gives one instance to participate in political discourse within a federation while actively shutting down the ability of specific instances participating is a large problem. If this project was started to begin with to prevent leftists from being deplatformed then this mechanic undermines that goal completely, I hate saying it but in the longterm this would develop into something that results in much more censorship of the left than currently exists on reddit and that to me seems like the opposite of the original goal of the project. I am concerned.
Lemmy is not Reddit, and it works differently. If you dont like it, you can go back there.
I… Don’t think that’s a helpful response? Weren’t users on this instance recently banned for saying “fuck off” and chastised as behaviour that instance owners should not be doing? This is functionally saying the same thing. Not that I support tone policing but it’s weirdly inconsistent with that stance.
I want Lemmy to succeed because I agreed with the principle that the left is getting deplatformed by corporate owners and, as such, would be better able to spread its wings if corporate owners were not the guardians of this social media.
The structure and mechanics of lemmy right now though lead to a longterm outcome that is worse for the left because it is in fact far more possible for rogue actors to succeed. I’m trying to constructively communicate that concern to you and “go back to reddit” makes it sound like you’re not listening or not willing to listen to the concern.
This is how I see this mechanic playing out in the longterm:
The reason I raise it is because the development of this problem will go like this:
Early on instances might be able to stop this malicious behaviour by not being so naive and instance owners demanding that other instance owners not play these games of fuckery with the mechanic. A mindset like with the federation council could develop but in an unwritten code sort of way for best-practice administration. Right now that’s not happening though and the wrecker instances are clearly wreaking havoc, most of the active users of lemmy can see it, all of lemmygrad can see it, and it’s even being recognised by hexbear users who are generally not currently cross-pollinating in the ecosystem but do discuss its issues. Some people with the ability to stop it are being blunderingly naive about the intentions of others and the behaviour occurring.
Assuming this does get under control and resolved early on because federated instances get their act together about this malicious behaviour. Growth happens and things go reasonably fine for quite a while.
A certain size threshold is reached where this approach of instance owners all knowing the history of Lemmy and being aware of its abuses starts to go away, too many instance owners exist for instance owners to all be collectively well educated on it all or to know one another, keeping people up to speed on best practices to avoid wrecker stuff and political and ideological manipulation becomes impossible.
Wrecker instances start to make a comeback and become a serious problem. Development realises that this isn’t going to work out and something needs to be done with the mechanics or the vision of the project will be bad in a “oh god it was harder for leftists to be deplatformed on reddit” kind of way.
5a. Mechanics get changed. MASSIVE outrage is incited at the change by the wrecker instances. They successfully manage to make several other naive liberal non-political instances believe them and join in on their shit. Absolutely huge shitshow ensues that turns into some really nasty stuff with the demand that the mechanic be returned and that features that previously existed shouldn’t be taken away. This becomes a real real problem at scale. Copycat projects spring up with dubious origins as an “alternative to lemmy”, exoduses are incited.
5b. Mechanics do not get changed. This ecosystem becomes a playground for ideological manipulation of content in a way that is completely invisible to users. Every single instance starts using the blocking tactics that are currently employed on twitter, but in a federated and complex way that causes enormous issues in this format.
Do you think I’m analysing this wrong? Genuine question. Is this not how you see it playing out and you see something else? What do you see playing out in the longterm with these mechanics?
Sorry but I dont have time to read all your ramblings.
Man nutomic I don’t know why you’re being like this. These are pretty fair concerns and we really should be hashing out theory of the future problems that will be faced as the population of users grows. I’ve been doing this online community lark for a very long time and have led communities from tens to hundreds up to millions of participants. I’ve done this in both hobbies like gaming and writing, I’ve done this professionally as a job in gaming itself (though I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone), and I’ve done this in political communities as well. On different platforms (going all the way back to usenet) you get different unique problems for the platform, created by the mechanics of the platform, and these problems manifest themselves completely differently at different quantities of users because there are different levels of engagement and personalness that can be achieved by those attempting to marshal their communities over the course of their growth.
All of this stuff is absolutely worth theorycrafting and trying to get ahead of. I genuinely do not know why you are being hostile to me about it? Please explain what I did wrong here to inspire this attitude? I would like to avoid upsetting you in future.
I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, but I think the problem is that you’re trying to debate what federation is. Do people control the content on their own instances or an instance you federate with control what they put on your server? To someone in the code these questions are not a philosophical debate of the future of federation. They are the essential misunderstanding of what federation means. That is something they have likely had to explain so many times it hurts. They might also be a human with other things happening in their life that have absolutely nothing to do with this post or even lemmy at all. I think it is worth remembering that we have no right to a person’s time or engagement.
Should it work differently? Maybe, but that would mean changing the definition of federation. To someone developing within a fixed model of federation what you are actually asking is to start over, redraw the map, design a new system from scratch. It might be worthwhile, but it is outside the scope of the project they have taken on. Lemmy is going to work the way it does because it is following a model that works that way. The model you describe doesn’t exist yet.
Here’s your opportunity. You can create that model. If you believe it is better maybe others will rally to it. Can you outline precisely who has control of what data on each server? Can you explain how a person or group hosting an instance can satisfy their moral and legal obligations under your system of ‘federation’?
I’m not trying to debate what it is, I’ve come to terms with what it is in its currently designed format over the course of the thread. I’m questioning whether it’s actually better for the left in the existing format because it feels like it will result in absolutely massive suppression of everything outside of the current hegemony. Not just for leftists but for every other battle occurring out there too. Maybe the fact that i misunderstood it to begin with, then learned, then quickly came to some pretty negative conclusions about what that will develop into over the course of its growth has led to the confusing that I’m “debating” what federation is. I see what it is, if I’m debating (not my intention) it is over whether that’s what it should be and whether it should in fact be something else.
On reddit the manner in which the left gets suppressed is at the admin level, and it comes in the form of having successful communities cut down when they start to boom. This is actually at quite a sizeable and impactful level when this occurs. In the background too the admins are consistently banning effective communists, especially moderators and community builders. The smallest possible infractions are used to do this. This all sounds pretty bad but it pales in comparison to the repression the left would receive if you gave every single modteam on reddit the ability to block their userbase from ever seeing responses or content from communists/leftists, who are quite easily identified by their subreddits of origin over on left-reddit. Every single modteam on reddit would take action against leftists, one after another, and the ones that do not will be infiltrated and eventually take action against leftists. That is the troubling ecosystem I am imagining Lemmy developing into in the future. Lemmy instances are in essence, subreddits but with the functionality of reddit in that they can have sub-subreddits(comms), the wider reddit side of things is filled in by federation.
Yes. I understand this.
The legality is the sticking point. Server owners NEED to have control of the content on their server. The issue is providing this while also building in some sort of organisational structure that limits the capability of servers to act repressively along ideological lines. As I mentioned in another comment, the solution that makes sense here is for the technology to work as it does but for the federation itself to have an organisational agreement between federating participants on moderator jurisdiction of things that are not illegal and perhaps a voting method for federation participants to defederate a member that is not abiding by the federation agreement. A combination of federation and some of wiki’s systems perhaps.
I don’t necessarily have a complete answer. I just think talking about this problem is essential at this point in time. Anyone that has been involved in multiple subreddit teams knows how fucking stupid reddit politics are, none of that is going to go away as things scale up, and with the systems the way they are and the behaviour of modteams I’ve seen I am concerned. That’s not even getting into the fact that I’ve watched entire communities be riled up into a form of digital colour-revolution against their modteams by bad-actors, as well as the infiltrations and takeovers by crypto-neoliberals. Antiwork has undergone so many purges and internal battles I have lost count and it has absolutely lost most of them to the liberals aiming to disarm it.