Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don't find appealing (there's even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don't want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
I just want to be able to control what I see. I have no desire to control what other people see and I sure as fuck don't want other people to control what I see.
That's it. That's my entire position on the matter.
Yeah that's why it's not going to last here. Like honestly I'm going to leave eventually because it's really annoying and it kills the experience for me and it just makes me want to argue with everybody to how judgmental and asinine they are
Just throwing my opinion in... Since we can block communities on our own, we don't really need someone to decide which to block for us. I mean, it's not my instance, so you can do whatever you want, and I actually might've decided to block lemmygrad.ml myself, but I'd still rather see the posts and make that determination myself.
I think the issue here people posting things in BeeHaw's communities that they don't want. The only way to stop that is to block users on a case by case basis, and since people can create unlimited free accounts this is ineffective given the low numbers of mods they have. The only way to work around this was to ban the two instances that had the most bad actors and easy registration.
I have floated the idea of a whitelist of users for their communities, but have been informed this isn't supported by Lemmy at the moment.
I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're a second language speaker where "user" is a masculine noun, but other genders exist lol. I encourage you to use "themselves" instead.
I will say that I sometimes like to visit controversial communities due to curiosity, and to be amazed at all the insane and braindead things people say. Furthermore, I don't like living in a bubble, and knowing what people I disagree with say/think is important to forming well-informed opinions. So sometimes I do like to subscribe to communities on even places like lemmygrad just for those reasons. It's annoying when instances block controversial instances, because controversy often interesting and very lurkable. I understand why those places are blocked, and I definitely don't want to see fascist bs on my feed all the time. But I wish I could have the best of both worlds.
I wanna decide what I get to see. It would be cool if the instances could be blocked on a followers-only basis. Like, blocked for the all feeds, blocked in general. But not for me if I follow it.
I actually chose this instance in large part because it only blocks one other one lol
I'll echo this sentiment. I also lurk communities that I don't agree with, and I want to see dissenting views. I find that heavy moderation often just leads to echo chambers where real issues can be kicked under the rug
Are we not capable of hiding things we don't want to see on Lemmy ourselves? Why would I want to be babysat by anyone when I can make adult choices on what I want to see my own damn self? Censorship was what ruined Reddit years ago. Leave it entirely up to the users.
The problem at the moment is that the community moderation tools are pretty limited. At some point there will be coordinated attacks on some communities and the moderation tools are not yet sufficient to defend against that sort of thing.
I sort of agree, but I also know that as Lemmy becomes more popular, defederating will become necessary as trolls and hate groups open instances. It's a problem on Mastodon. A trans friend there posted about her experience bra shopping and a bunch of transphobes from other Mastodon servers came in to attack her, including an admin of one server who called her a slur and told her to stop reporting because they'd never remove anything hateful towards trans people.
On a centralized service like Reddit, hate subs can just be quarantined by the admins or removed wholesale. With a decentralized service, every instance will need to defederate those groups to keep them out. There's no way to bar them from making a new server.
I have an account here on kbin.social, but I also wanted a dedicated lemmy account. I chose fmhy because it aligns with what I want: hearing every voice, for better or for worse. I considered beehaw due to their large gaming community, but I read about their philosophy and saw that they were trying to create more of a safe space for their users (suspicion recently confirmed). If someone wants a more positive experience without having to worry about trolling and harassment, beehaw would be the better choice. I am personally fine with treading through sludge to find hidden gems, so I made my own choice.
Bear in mind that defederation isn't bidirectional. If beehaw decides to defederate fmhy, I don't care, I can still see gaming@beehaw and interact with users that live on instances still federated with my own. But the beehaw users are safe from from troll-friendly hosts, so everybody wins.This isn't true, as pointed out by zinklog. It can still be worked around by having accounts in multiple places, but even with the eventual account migration feature, this makes it impossible for anyone to see everything in any one place. Maybe this can be fixed in the future, as the fediverse continues to develop?
To directly map it to the example of your friend, if she chose to live on an instance more like beehaw, she would still be able to interact with the federated community at large, but be better shielded. If someone tried to throw slurs at her from an instance with a lower standard, she wouldn't see it at all, and the person delivering the slurs likely wouldn't even realize it.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it's my understanding that defederation is in fact bidirectional. lemmy.world can't see new posts from beehaw after the announcement.
And once again what stops the user from blocking them theirselves? People have the ability to block individuals and whole subdomains, why not do it theirselves?
What percentage of people have to be posting hate on a specific topic before a certain server decides to defederate them? I'm in no way advocating hate speech but what happens if you have a large server with just two instances causing trouble? The owner believes in free speech and doesn't want to block anything but there are dozens of other instances on that server that are behaving normally, with thousands of people using it daily? Do you block that server to your entire user base because of two instances? Do you make all of the other users on that instant suffer because of that? Or do you leave it up to your own users to make their own decisions?
Regardless of how this goes in the end I think the instance operators should have clear and open policies before people decide what servers they want to join to begin with.
I think that structures that permit people and communities to do literally whatever they want is how lemmy can thrive. The people in beehaw (myself included) are on the whole perfectly chill with the defederation, and the specific reasons and conditions for that defederation. The admins have been open about the fact that they want more moderation tools for our community before refederating with those instances, it isn't a permanent state of affairs. I like beehaw. Its chill. Maybe other people wouldn't like that, but then maybe just don't host your account there? There are tons of other places to be. This isn't reddit, if you aren't inside beehaw, its management doesn't affect you.
Except for the fact that defederating is bidirectional at the moment. It would be nice if the platform's defederation and the user's defederation were less tied together, but as far as I can tell, the beehaw admins only defederated because there wasn't a compromise between "do nothing" and "ban everything" available to them.
thank you for not being a drama queen and railroading this whole thing by leveraging the small amount of power you have to make some bullshit point about your social views.
Because basically, everyone got scared from them being communists/socialists and just decided to defederate from them.
It's nothing more than fear based on years of propaganda pushed by western countries, nothing more. They don't defederate from anyone, yet everyone feels the need to defederate from them. Yes, they do have leftist views, they do think the world of many current and ex communist leaders, but if you don't like that, you can just block their communities 🤷.
Other than that, their communites are mostly like everyone else's, politics, memes, piracy, comics, etc. They even have a few LGBTQ+ dedicated communities and about 20% of them are LGBTQ+ acording to a recent demographic survey they had (you can find it in their main community), so... basically, they're human, just like the rest of us.
Many of them are well informed, not to mention highly educated, so I can see why there is fear amongst other instances - a debate starts, most people will flop regarding info, facts, whatever, they'll have the upper hand in the debate, so why actually try and listen to what they've got to say, they're just tankies anyway - defederate 🤷.
If you don't like their communities, just block them, no need to defederate from them... at least I can't see a reason.
I see. I like the kbin philosophy of just federating with everyone. lemmygrad stuff doesn't pop up that often here and from a quick look it didn't really look like an issue. But yeah I guess you're right that it's just fear? or people just wanting to curate/block certain things...
Lemmygrad is specifically problematic for being predominantly Marxist Leninist (as the .ml suggests). I think you're probably right that people just reject them outright because of AH THE COMMUNISTS WANT TO END CAPITALISM red scare type stuff present in Western countries, but where I specifically find Lemmygrad (and other tankies) being way too negative to interact with is when they get into defending Communist regimes.
If you asked the average Lemmygrad user, they too would be enveloped in propaganda, though this time coming from communist regimes and praxis they've read. They have been deluded into believing Stalin and Mao were good leaders, that authoritarianism is okay if it advances their favorite political agenda (though for some reason also claim that these countries aren't authoritarian), and that these regimes should be implemented everywhere.
The worst of it all is their constant genocide denial. Yes, the USA and other Western countries have done a similar amount (maybe even more?) of really bad stuff in this area (e.g. natives, apartheids, roma, etc. 💀), but I think broadly a well educated Western citizen, especially a leftist one, should be able to understand and admit that what their country did was wrong and should never be done again. A Lemmygrad user instead defends things like the Uighur genocide and Holodomor, saying both that they don't exist and are "western propaganda" while at the same time entertaining the counterfactual and saying if they did happen it was justified because the West did it too and they were being very mean to communism 😡.
When you get to that level of malevolent stupidity, you start to look more and more like a fascist that supports genocide and absolute power of the state and that uses strategic ambiguity to express your toxic beliefs, than you do a leftist. I don't think anyone suggests we stay federated with a fascist instance because fascists are misunderstood after "years of propaganda pushed by western countries" to discredit Hitler and Mussolini, but here you are doing the moral equivalent.
They support North Korea for goodness sake. Being communists isn't the problem, it's that they support fascist dictatorships pretending to be communist.
nice to hear that about open federation. I feel that the real benefit of the concept of federation is decentralization - and de-federating like beehaw did just ruins that.
Instances that defederate are at a disadvantage though, because it hurts their users. There is a natural incentive to stay federated. Defederation is really a nuclear-scale moderation tool, and it's one of the founding principles of the fediverse: independant administration. If you don't like some administrators, vote them out by joining an instance that better matches your needs instead.
In any case, the admins of these instances are collaborating and have stated that this is a temporary measure untill better mod tools become available. I'm not worried at all.
But no doubt by, some communities are going to be just so at odds, that it's probably best if there are mechanisms to keep them separated. And you know what? That's just fine.
I really hope that we’ll get the option to migrate accounts from once instance to another soon, like Mastodon has. It sucks that you can wake up one day and no longer be able to interact with your communities. Without migration options, you’re kinda stuck.
They not happy about it, but it was the only way for them to stop users circumventing their account creation restrictions by registering an account at places that didn't have those, and just posting over there.
According to their post, they basically did it as a last resort, since Lemmy doesn't have good enough moderation tools to deal with the influx, and they don't have the manpower either.
This is not a matter of different point of view but a moderation one, since they are outnumbered for now with flow of new people and bad actors.
I don't agree. They appear to have a lot more moderators than kbin.social or lemmy.world. They didn't have any higher number of trolls. What they want is to remove more comments. Comments which they think offend people. This is all about a point of view. They want a safe space. An echo chamber. They want to be protected from diversity.
I think the general idea behind Lemmy and activity pub was not to have all the instances and groups on one server to begin with. It's just that some of the older users of Lemmy/kbin/mastodon, already had the servers up and running instead of people creating own self-hosted instances.
The intention was more for one server to host one instance on a specific topic and then federate with the rest of the community. That server would just be in control of that one instance, like a subreddit on Reddit's main site.
Instead what you had was three or four people who were used to the back end software, creating a bunch of groups or letting be created a bunch of groups on their instance. This is going to centralize the population to certain servers instead of ending up with thousands of small federated servers.
And once the personal belief systems and moderation start seeping into all groups on that server we're going to see problems. The more control one single person has, the higher the likelihood is that they're going to start abusing the power in some way, even if they don't think it's an abuse their selves.
The fact that users can easily move to another instance will serve as something of a check and balance against this kind of behavior by mods and admins though, wouldn’t it?
Can they though? As far as I can tell there's no affordance for migrating accounts, so if you want to move instances, you are forced to abandon your account.
Maybe not a huge deal right at this instant, but each day that goes by, users more posts and comments accumulate that makes losing an account suck.
Which means the is (unintended) pressure to stay put baked into the technical design. If letting users move freely between servers is a design goal, there need to be technical affordances for it.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances
I personally disagree. There will be entirely private instances, there will be instances with highly restricted federation. There will be instances that federate with most and there will be instances that federate without restriction. That's the beauty of the model and that's why kbin and lemmy with thrive.
Each instance will have different perspective on it. Some would obviously censor more stuff than us. It will depend on the user what kind of experience he is looking for.
Also, what happens if I have an account in an instance that suddenly gets backlash for some arbitrary reason and other instances block it? Would I be able to migrate to one of those blocking instances?
Some people see basic moderation as censorship. Personally I’m ok with banning bigotry. I see that as basic moderation. And yeah, that is censorship.
There should be places edgy bigots can do their thing, I guess, but it shouldn’t be on the front page of Lemmy. Or in comment threads in general communities. Moderation will be essential if we want this places to grow, and for instances to interact.
Thanks for that. I tried to subscribe to some German communities on Feddit just to find out that they blocked our instance on their end. Fuck them I guess, I'm staying here.