The future of defederation

Indeed. We're going to be needing a lot of fancier moderation tools for the fediverse in the near future, things that the Twitter-like microblogging probably didn't have to worry about.

Defederating from an entire instance is probably still going to be warranted in some situations, when a whole instance is basically rotten in some way. But I could see plenty of fine-grained tools that could be applied, such as:

• blacklist/whitelist specific communities, or communities that meet certain criteria. For example, you could only allow content from communities with a certain number of subscribers or moderators to filter out "noise."
• Same with users, you could perhaps block content from users that are under X number of days old.
• "Reputation score" is probably pretty gameable, but you could perhaps track how many downvotes your own instance members give and auto-block users or communities that get too many.
• Giving individual users access to these tools in their settings would let them set their own "view" of the fediverse to be more to their liking.

This is early days yet, it's going to be very interesting seeing all the various approaches being tried out.

There's probably the bigger issue of culture shock for those crowding to Lemmy as an escape from Reddit, of whether those individuals will choose to adapt to interacting/debating with people dissimilar to them. The problem of Reddit (as one of the reasons I've stopped touching it many years ago now) is some of the insularity of the platform, especially when you have overcontrolling mods in a subreddit that suppresses any dissenting outlook (which then creates a monoculture).

Whereas on the fediverse the rules are very different, since anyone from any platform that also speaks ActivityPub can step in on a conversation. Just a discounted $2 domain from Namecheap and someone's able to set up another instance with little friction. Meanwhile if a community goes whitelist-only, it just erects a wall around the userbase, and typically stops the growth of the instance, with people ditching it because of lack of activity. Even with defederation back to days of OStatus, there'd always be some momentary drama where an admin would block an entire server, often just because of a few users (while users have a Block button they can use; or in the worse case, the admin can block specific users of a remote instance). Nonetheless, that's played out plenty against ShitposterClub for years (of disproportionate server-wide bans), and yet, it's all the ban-happy instances that have disappeared, while ShitposterClub still lives on strong today.

There's going to be instances that'll pop up with abusive admins that'll try to subversively control the policies/moderation of remote instances (e.g. "ban this user of your's, or else we'll defederate you", or more stupidly "don't use this software, because of the developer's political views"); however, admins should never play into that coercion. Even if there's a few friends exclusive to that instance, there's no justification to let a manipulative actor get what they want. Over time, an overcontrolling instance admin will usually try to desperately tighten their grip, and usually any sane people will ditch for better instances--so don't strain too much over unfair acts of defederation in the present.

But ultimately it comes down to whether any "Reddit refugees" will chose to adapt to the broader fediverse, versus trying to recreate the antipatterns of Reddit and ending up with many hundreds of dead Lemmy (or similar) instances instead.

And as a side-point: I wish people could move beyond the useless word "toxic". There's a broad spectrum of vocabulary in English to describe things, while "toxic" is just used as the quick catch-all of "it's just bad, okay". For example, consider how meaningless the above message would be if I substituted the words "overcontrolling", "manipulative", etc with "toxic" instead. Whereas I'm articulating why something is bad, versus just declaring something 'bad'.

Per https://pawb.social/comment/160818 I think the problem with SIJW is that they have open signups, and trolls are churning accounts there to cause trouble. If they restrict their signups and ban their troublemakers, we may not need to stay defederated (assuming that's the only reason).

I do agree that we should try to be reactive if possible. It hurts both servers to defederate, and causes problems for the lemmyverse as a whole, so IMO it shouldn't be taken lightly.

Here's what happens when you defederate the entire internet, you'll be back on Reddit and users will be asking you "hey man why can't I talk to XYZ". This is literally what has happened to dozens of Mastodon instances already.

There are a lot of people on this ActivityPub thing who will block you for using the wrong software stack, block you because some old passed around list also had some domains that haven't been online in years, and the best part is they will never ask you before doing so. There's no way around this, other than running monolithic websites such as rdrama.net (which only work for one community).