On feddit.de, lemmy.world is only temporarily defederated because of CSAM until a patch is merged into Lemmy that prevents images from being downloaded to your own instance.
So I'll just be patient and wait. It's understandable the admins don't want to get problems with law enforcement.
Yes, but arguably it was never very scalable for federated software to store large media. It gets utterly massive quick. Third party image/video hosts that specialize in hosting those things can do a better job. And honestly, that's the kinda data that is just better suited for centralization. Many people can afford to spin up a server that mostly just stores text and deals with basic interactions. Large images or streaming video gets expensive fast, especially if the site were to ever get even remotely close to reddit levels.
Not to shill but I just found the other day that cloudflare has a csam scanning and reporting engine built into their proxies. In theory it gives them a window into the data stream by them decrypting and re-encrypting that could snatch a password hash, but 2FA makes that useless after a minute. Basically it scans anything that gets put in the cache and reports it, notifies you to pull it down, and automatically puts up a 451 block on the link.
Do we have a way to combine feeds yet? I don't know of one. So it's kinda annoying to jump from account to account to make sure your seeing everything.
I'm not sure there is. Personally, I wish there were a way for an individual to block entire instances since I'm a terminally online individual with 3 accounts who sorts by all -> new for content :P
I get what you're saying, and hopefully it's a feature that gets added. I'm sure eventually it will, or maybe someone will make an app or an add-on
Yes, actually! Liftoff for Lemmy is still in early development, but you can get it on iOS, Android, Windows, and Linux, and it provides precisely this feature. There are a lot of features that Liftoff is yet to incorporate, probably most notably moderator tools and support for adding Kbin accounts -- but give it a try regardless, and do what you can to contribute to its further development. Liftoff is an app with a lot of promise and a surprising amount of functionality already this early in its development.
It's worth noting that Liftoff is a fork of the now abandoned project Lemmur, which I believe was the first Lemmy client to support combining feeds.
I'm building this into an app right now, I've got an android beta open if you're interested in helping decide the course of it.
Right now it just does the normal stuff with some extra features and lots of filters, but the goal has always been to build custom feeds on your device from a lot of individual sources. I'm redesigning stuff under the hood with that and support for other fediverse integration, I'm looking at kbin and mastodon in the near term, but I think I want pixelfed and maybe friendica down the road
Fair, but a lot of new users might also get discouraged if the first thing they see is content from exploding-heads or hexbear, and the instances that strive to be safe, inclusive spaces and thus do a significant amount of defederating are usually quite forthright about this when you sign up. For example, I knew just what to expect when I joined beehaw.
The instance I'm posting from now tries to keep things inclusive more via moderation vs. defederation. There are pros and cons to each approach. I can see both perspective.
I just don't think either approach harms the fediverse. I think that's a bit melodramatic.
Social media needs to be as easy as possible if you're going to reach the masses. Most people do not give a shit enough to create 3 accounts; they'll just leave.
Forums died for a reason. Reddit took over that space for me because it was one place to see everything. Federation is a better version of that. Decentralized and connected is how the Internet should be
I don't get it either. Defederation is a tool just like banning or spam prevention. If it's unused it's pointless to have.
But you don't ban everyone for a single offense just like to don't defederate lightly. If you do then people will move elsewhere and the problem resolves itself
I would say that a big part of the issue is the difficulty in transferring one's account. Ignoring the fact that one simply can't transfer their posts, trying to manually copy all previously subscribed communities to a new account is a rather tedious task. I am aware that there exists scripts that can automate that process, but I don't think that it's fair to expect that the userbase should run 3rd party scripts. Until account transfer is properly implemented, defederation will continue to be a major issue.
The migration must be perfect, which means posts, comments and up/downvotes from the source instance must appear as if they've always been on the target instance.
I think the best part of the fed is that you can see ALL the content from the other instances. I personally feel like its what the internet is supposed to be.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: If instances weren't supposed to be ever defederate, then we wouldn't have the tool. In the absence of real moderation/admin tools it's going to get used more frequently. And that's the admin owner's right!
I just use one, but AFAICT they don't defederate, they haven't even defederated anyone on their mastodon instance and that's had a lot longer to have all manner of inter-instance bullshit develop.
It would be less of a problem if we as users on an instance could block entire instances, effectively defederating it just for our user. Then those running instances could defederate only in severe cases.
Blocking an instance on a user by user basis has a key drawback in the sense of those instances you block can still influence the posts and comments via up and down votes
Defederating basically means that those instances no longer have any influence on the community you're a part of
Basically think of it this way, say you're on a queer friendly instance that is still federated with a right wing instance. That right wing instance can manipulate the posts of the queer friendly instance by up voting queerphobic content and down voting queer positive content. And you block the instance as a user those votes still federated over so you'll see queer positive content getting down voted to oblivion.
I can't wait for Lemmy to catch up with Mastodon in this regard. Between this and not being able to easily migrate your account to a new instance, it doesn't feel like Lemmy users have as much of the freedom that the fediverse can provide.
Would it though? I understand that the main reason for defederating is to avoid your instance downloading CSAM posted in another instance, which could get an instance maintainer in legal problems. Allowing users to block entire instances won't help, because the illegal media will still get downloaded by the instance.
IANAL, if subscribers had a decryption key, and the instance only stored encrypted copies of the media, would instances still be liable? Kinda-sorta like Tor relay-only nodes; it seems like only exit nodes get in trouble.
Some vile individuals started spamming a community on lemmy.world with some awful content, so some instances defederated with them temporarily as images are decentralised and currently hosted on any instance that has people who saw it as well as on the original instance it was posted to. That'd my understanding, anyway
Generally we can post topics and comments in any instance and can be viewed from any instance.
After defederating, the communication between the instances will be cut. so we cannot comment/post with the instance that was defederated.
Pretty sure they meant why is this a fresh topic with OP acting like it's happening all over the place. I'm similarly OOTL as I haven't seen any big surge in defed announcements recently. Though I could understand if that was happening in response to the CSAM issues.
To add on to this: Instance admins have no control over moderating content from other instances that they're federated with. An acceptable post on one instance could be rule breaking to another. The only option that other instance has is to defederate. Admins have acknowledged defederation is an extreme measure for what is often just a few problem communities or users, but they have no other option.