this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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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.
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.
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..
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"
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except there are many users who get banned by the Beehaw admins because they dared disagree with the admins. Beehaw's adminstration has an extensive history of this sort of behaviour, silencing any critics they can.
Well before the reddit blackout wave, they literally had a “no sources” rule because users kept questioning the mods. Likewise their current “rule set” states what they say, goes, and that everything is up to them, not the rules. They say that with all cases (except obvious trolls), they will always warn first. I have yet to ever see any kind of warning from any of their admins.
Truth is they were being questioned on sh.it and on lemmy.world, so they blocked both. You can check their modlog to see just how little spam they have to deal with. Instead they spend most of their time on discord.
I was a victim of their abuse -- I personally got banned because I got into an argument with the admin there. They wrongly assumed that I was American and made a claim to counter my argument. I then pointed out their mistake that their claim doesn’t apply to my country, and then – Boom, banned, no appeal, no warning, nothing.
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.
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
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.
Because some problems require a hammer and others require orbital nukes...
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.
You could say that, they have said more than once that they want their instance to be their safe-space, which is cool and all, if their users are all up on defederating at the fall of a leaf along with the mods that's cool, 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.
But I've said it more than once, until we get migration tools think of your account as disposable or prepare to keep multiple accounts to juggle servers.
That said, I think they would be happier using a forum-like server instead of the fediverse because they seem like the kind of instance to end up isolating themselves.
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.
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 ~~mods~~ admins 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.
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.
O no, the platform is operating exactly as intended.
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.
You and me both. Presumably a lot of others as well.
Feels like Lemmy is going to shoot itself in the foot with this.
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.
Well this is the design problem in ActivityPub. There are Nostr and OcapPub that are promising to resolve this problem.