OpenStars

Yeah, that does help - e.g. if people started defederating lemmy.ml, then all the Hexbear users that went there after being defederated from many popular instances would make alts on other platforms and it would be much harder to avoid their continual trolling:-).

And yes I've previously had several quite pleasant conversations with people from lemmy.ml, though I have now managed to leave them behind by moving to PieFed.social where I can block the entire instance. I will block many innocent users that way but... I am okay with that, compared to the alternative of having to put up with each new one that comes along and harasses people. Many people of conscience are fleeing that instance anyway, and the rest have most definitely been warned so it's their choice, but I am not letting their recalcitrance dictate my own choices in turn:-).

Truth hurts.

Janeway hurts moar though:-D

I don't doubt it. Threads I thought was more of a preemptive measure though, since iirc Meta wasn't ready to actually start sending any of its data towards the Fediverse. The "third" member of the big 3 then is lemmygrad.ml. Though most instances defederate from it, even if they don't defederate from hexbear.net or lemmy.ml, so possibly even without having defederated from it explicitly you aren't really seeing much content coming your way from it?

Oh no, your defederation is somehow wonky. I don't see lemmygrad.ml communities, not that I wanted to you understand but it's not in your defed list so they should be there, but I do see communities from both lemmy.ml and hexbear.net. Maybe simply adding the instance names is not enough and you need to "reinitialize" the data or some such? Here's one: https://quokk.au/c/memes@lemmy.ml and here's another: https://quokk.au/c/memes@hexbear.net. But then again... all the posts are old, so maybe that's how it is supposed to look? I dunno, so my message is probably confusing, but I thought I would offer it anyway just in case you didn't know, and if that helps you figure anything out!:-)

Good point.

Before I saw the /s my brain was cracking up ... uh, the .ml admins are the devs tho?!?!?!

And they have actively taken steps to prevent people from finding how who did what action. Only ~~authority figures~~ admins can see some of that now, while the rest of us just see "mod". In fairness, it does protect a mod team against aboose.

Though it shifts the balance of power away from the worker/peasant/user-class and upwards to the we-are-all-equal-but-some-of-us-are-more-equal-than-others-who-are-supposedly-also-equal class. You know, the principles of "communism", where famously we are all equal except the handful of rulerz above us all?

But as I mentioned elsewhere, it's their software, and they can - and WILL btw - make it work however they want to. We are the ones who choose to use it... or not.

Omg that is beautiful! Yes as you say that particular style of image was really hard to get working as Lemmy likewise struggled with it - perhaps you arrived at the same or similar solution, but even if yours is a totally different solution that's awesome that you've already cracked it!:-)

I've been trying to keep a list of things I am experiencing, though some of it were things that I encountered on a smaller Lemmy instance as well, like delays in federation - e.g. I pulled in this post https://piefed.social/post/295422 but it shows (to me) as having zero comments, when in reality it should have 18. Though I am guessing that there is a quite good chance that it may catch up in the next day or two. I also tried to "leave" and then re-"join" some communities, in case that may help trigger the federation action to pull from the original host.

Hey I have a question that you may enjoy, and if not then that's okay to tell me too:-). On a Mac desktop using Chrome, I cannot simply do the left-swipe to use the "back button" to return to a previous page. That works on Lemmy, but not PieFed. Although moving the mouse way up to the actual Back button works, as does keyboard shortcuts (command-leftarrow). And the same for right-swipe / Forward button. I am not sure if I am even using the correct terminology there but I hope that helps:-). It seems so silly, but since it is something that I may do tens of times each hour, possibly multiple times per minute at peak, I find that it really slows down the navigation. Is that something that others have mentioned and/or that could perhaps be fixed, or is this something too deeply ingrained in how the UI works? Making for a "smoother experience" seems like it would be a good thing if possible though.

And either way, I hope this conversation is interesting to you:-).

There was a great mini-series we had going on in Lemmy about this... I can't find any of it now though. So this is the best I can do on short notice:

Edit: ooh, here's one of them:

Thank you for your service. You are part of the solution here, we all can see it:-).

Well, there was something about encouraging assassination, though it was two months ago. Possibly the admins were noticing a pattern of behavior and just decided to hell with it.

So imho the chief issues here are perhaps more related to transparency, explaining what happened - OP had no idea even? - and why (as in precisely which rule), rather than trying to guess if it was justified or not, especially since we can no longer see all the linked stuff (unless someone has admin privileges and wants to look).

Edit: also, I just had... significantly more than a sip, of 70 proof whiskey, so apparently I knew that you were going to say this? Yeah... we'll go with that:-).

The only ways that I know of to user-block Lemmy.ml:

1. non-Lemmy PieFed (you can block any custom instance you wish - it lacks some polish compared to Lemmy but it's really growing up strong and is even ahead in some ways, e.g. this one) or Sublinks, in the meantime Tesseract on dubvee.org that says it will switch to use the latter eventually. Edit: I forgot to mention Mbin, b/c I am not sure if it can or not. Someone said that originally Kbin could user-block whole instances, but there seem to be reports that Mbin cannot for whatever reason, and I have not made an account to check it out personally or a post to ask someone.

2. lemmy.cafe that is very welcoming and has blocked all of the big 3, + threads, and interestingly, virtually nothing else. I think this should be among the new default recommendations really, the only downside seems to be that it has only a single admin so perhaps less stable than e.g. lemm.ee (though the latter allows lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml - which for some people is a good thing, but for people who want the opposite of that, without other additional restrictions, that's lemme.cafe). It is notably running 0.19.6-beta.9 though, so the admin seems super on the ball, and it has really nice welcoming messages too, guiding people to a variety of helpful resources. Edit: oh I forgot about your instance, quokk.au, also only a single user, though it doesn't block lemmygrad.ml for whatever reason, but yes that's another option.

3. someone said that the Boost app allows user-blocking of instances. I cannot confirm personally nor know of others - Voyager (on Android) cannot, but what about e.g. Sync?

4. Lemmy ostensibly has a "user block of instances", except it doesn't really at all - all it does is block communities, not users, and what little protection it did offer irt the latter has actually weakened over time (e.g. for those in Lemmy.World running 0.19.3, users from blocked instances cannot trigger a "notification", whereas for most people outside of that running 0.19.5 they can). At this point I don't expect anything that will allow blocking lemmy.ml users to ever be released on any instance running the Lemmy codebase - the only options seem to be move to an instance offering defederation, leave Lemmy entirely, or suck it up and swallow what you're given.

It makes sense that most instance admins do not want to defederate though, b/c some communities are still held hostage on the lemmy.ml instance - e.g. !firefox@lemmy.ml with 3.6K MAU (monthly active users) vs. the next largest one !firefox@lemmy.world with only 0.7K MAU, that's an enormous difference! Actually it would be best if communities, especially niche ones, were not held hostage by ANY kind of political maneuvering - except there is literally nothing these days that is not political, it would seem, including "facts" themselves.

But yeah, one reason to move communities off is that the mods themselves could accidentally get booted, or at the very least their users could at any point say something that sets off the ban hammer - and then never be allowed to post or comment in the community again? Unless it's a community called I_fucking_love_Russia_and_China_too, it's a risk that can seriously fragment the Fediverse, to tie that content to a certain brand of political thinking.

Especially one that is nowhere written down, and could change at any given moment, also without any prior notification.

But so long as you continue to use the Lemmy software, what right does anyone have to complain about how the devs wish to implement their own code, which they wrote for themselves, for their own desires and ends?

If we want better, we have to make things that are better, on our own.

Unfortunately I cannot see my own image here:-(. There is no Preview functionality yet on PieFed, though I confirm that you can see it properly on Lemmy.World. So there are some kinks to be worked through... but yeah, maybe this doomed instance that looks at first like it's behind Lemmy will pull through and ahead! :-)

This has nothing to do with the community. The modlog shows that you were banned site-wide from lemmy.ml, which is implemented by a ban from each individual community individually (so despite how this says it was done by a "mod", it was actually an admin):

Removed Comment So they are doing a China? by macniel@feddit.org reason: Rule 1

It is an unwritten rule that you are not allowed to criticize China there. Or Russia. Or anything else that they do not like.