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
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.
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.
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
O no, the platform is operating exactly as intended.
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.
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.
You and me both. Presumably a lot of others as well.
Feels like Lemmy is going to shoot itself in the foot with this.
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!