I appreciate the decentralized architecture and the privacy that comes with it, but it's organization isn't great.
I'm not sure if I understand why certain instances can choose not to federate with other instances. It just seems to limit the content that is accessible to me. I don't want to have to switch between 4-5 Lemmy accounts that I switch just to curate what I to see. Its impractical.
I'm not happy with the changes on reddit and will most likely ditch entirely soon. Lately I've only been using it for tutorials. But at least I wasn't closed off from viewing anything and everything I wanted without sifting through instances. I hope great things come for Lemmy, competitors are great, but in its current state it just seems doomed.
Lemme give you 2 scenarios to explain why defederation is an important option:
An instance with views and forms of diacourse wholly incompatible with yours. As a hyperbolic silly example to illustrate, let's say there's a community of cultists who believe in Cthulhu. They encourage a steady diet of kidnapped babies, and ritual drownings. They brigade like crazy, and their moderators encourage them to do this. Anybody who doesn't follow the great old one is an idiot, an asshole, and they express this in extremely vulgar terms. If they were a reddit community, they'd get banned. Here, they get isolated to their own little corner where they can't scream obscenities at people.
An instance with thousands of bots spamming out innocuous looking links that lead to malware. Again, if they were a reddit bot farm, (hopefully) they'd be banned. Here, as it's an open source project and you can't restrict who uses it and for what, defederation is the best you can do.
Lemmygrad seems to be a bit of a target of defederation by many instances, and there's probably some history there that I'm not aware of as I'm also new to Lemmy. Even though I may not agree with some of their hardline views, the users seem to be respectful when commenting over here on lemmy.ml, and the very few times I've commented over there, they've been cool. Consequently, I'm glad lemmy.ml federates with them.
EDIT: I should probably state that even though I'm cool talking with the respectful users, had to block a few communities there. I don't want to see the Death to NATO community cheerleading the Russian invasion, for example.
Lemmygrad seems to be a bit of a target of defederation by many instances, and there’s probably some history there that I’m not aware
a number of Lemmygrad users conducted a "special military operation to denazify" lemmyml, beehaw, sopuli and the Lemmyverse. Some of the history is here https://lemmy.ca/c/fediverselore. They are credited with putting down wolfballs, an actual alt-right instance to their credit. Some of the conflict very loosely spread to github.
Some senior lemmygrad members have a long history of hostility with PrivacyGuides, see the post here and iirc some on [email protected]