hey folks, we’ll be quick and to the point with this one: ##### we have made the
decision to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. we recognize this
is hugely inconvenient for a wide variety of reasons, but we think this is a
decision we need to take immediately. the remainder of the post...
We still federate, but god knows how long that will last. They have defederated nearly 400 instances and they sound lile theyre losing the plot
This feels like a bad idea. Let's look at some popular federated networks:
Anyone with a phone number can call anyone else with a phone number.
Anyone with an email can email anyone else with an email.
Anyone can setup a Matrix server and message anyone else with federation turned on.
There is one DNS system despite it being decentralised.
This feels like a modern day IRC netsplit and we will all lose. This decision needs to be reversed once better tooling / organisation is put in place. Blocking should be done at a different layer (e.g. call blocking or email spam filtering).
But it is absolutely true that telephone networks and email servers that get used too much for spam calls/messages will get blacklisted by other providers.
If your email provider gets a bad reputation then your emails will get blocked (that is a lot of how spam filtering works). That is pretty analogous.
This is different because it bifurcates the network. End users will have to understand which Lemmy providers federate with whichever others in a way they don't have to with email today. It also feels like the bar to classifying these two providers as malicious is a lot lower than with email.