You choose what instance you are on. Quit the pseudointellectual whining.
No server operator needs to federate with you.
No server operator needs to tolerate things they don't want on their instance.
No user of an instance needs to personally curate their own extensive never ending blocklist of users and channels they don't want to see.
Quit your pseudo-intellectual whining and choose what instance(s) work for you. If you think regularly interacting with shit content somehow helps you stay out of an echo chamber then go ahead and make a second account on those garbage instances full of hateful people. Then you can read both the decent servers and the trash ones and be the fedora wearing ackshually right fair and balanced uber nerd you always wanted to be.
Edit: The huge number of upvotes on this post compared to the low numbers on the whiney imposers' posts is proof of exactly where this community places its priorities.
We're already at peak reddit replacement if we have whining in the comments about the contents of another post whining about users. I feel so at home here.
According to some of the posts in here, apparently, wanting to ban Nazis from your instance and refusing to rebroadcast their toxic shit is being "entitled"...
Completely agree, this whole entitled attitude about "we left reddit because censoreship hurr durr, now u do same thing, you have to do what we tell you" is really annoying..
Nobody is censoring you, you are free to join and visit whatever instances you want and watch their content.. You can even host your own instance where you federate with whoever you want, you have free access to the code.. But nobody is forced to host ANY content they don't want on the server THEY themselves pay for..
The people leaving Reddit because of censorship did so long ago. These dissatisfied/censored people have a new home anyway... They can view child porn, people being brutally tortured/murdered, and make all the threats of violence they want on Twitter now. They just have to be careful not to insult the, "free speech absolutist" dictator or he'll have them banned.
The mass migration today is because of dissatisfaction with Reddit's decision to end 3rd party apps and specifically, the way in which they handled it. The dishonesty, the heavy-handed dictator-like seizure of protesting communities, the complete disregard for accessibility/moderation tools, etc.
To claim that people are leaving Reddit "because of censorship" isn't just missing the point, it's flat out wrong.
There needs to be some clear guidance on this for newbies. As it is, you have to stumble across scraps of random discussions to learn about defederation and partial federation politics. You generally do this after you e already spent time on an account. Seriously, how is a person supposed to know what instance to choose up front?
The people screaming about free speech for bigots & fascists seem to neglect the free speech of the instance owners and admins.
They're doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. Paying for bandwidth and servers. Donating their time to create the software, work out the kinks, and moderate the communities so we don't strangle each other.
From their perspective: Would you want to use your money and time to rebroadcast Nazism or similarly toxic ideology? Because that's what they're being asked, and most of them say "HELL NO!" When the chuds are demanding that these people rebroadcast such crap, it's like they're asking these admins to do a Hitler salute with them.
This is their space. They have free speech rights too. That's what curation is, free speech. You send a message by the choice of messages you rebroadcast or refuse to rebroadcast.
The people screaming about free speech for bigots & fascists seem to neglect the free speech of the instance owners and admins.
This is a pretty farcical argument, because the instance admins set things up specifically so that the instance users can discuss and vote on what the instance does.
Content moderation absolutely is a form of free speech. They get to decide who to associate with and what ideals to rebroadcast with their own equipment. They aren't government entities and do reserve the right to express their individual beliefs. If you have a problem with that, find a better-suited instance for your own personal beliefs, or host your own.
If you want further reading on the subject, here's a well-written post that explains the positive relationship between more active content moderation and "freer" speech.
If I own a wall and allow people to post signs on it, I can choose to remove whatever signs I deem inappropriate. The creator can put their signs up somewhere else and I’m under no obligation to use my property to broadcast their message if I choose not to.
Nothing stops you from using your own resources to broadcast your message. Be the change you want to see in the world.
Reminder that defederation is an explicit feature implemented into fediverse platforms. It is meant to be used as the instance sees fit. The notion that you can never defederate with anyone defeats the purpose of the fediverse, we might as well make one huge centralized platform in that case.
No other instance owes you a federation to your instance. The fediverse's whole philosophy is that instances get to configure both who they federate with and who federates with them.
Finally, there is a certain irony in the people screaming "freedom" and "free speech" telling admins of private instances what they can and can't do with their own platform.
I agree in principle but if it ends up with defederation-by-default, or something similarly restrictive, you'll kill the whole point of the federation and we can just go back to Reddit. IMO it should be used very sparingly (mostly to combat full on spam kinda like with email) and largely let the users themselves decide.
OP rants about seeing garbage from garbage instances but if you actually subscribe to the communities you want, you'll only see comments from those "garbage instances", and there can still be decent people with interesting viewpoints on there.
That's all true. I do also think that there needs to be a certain amount of built-in stability in order for federated communities to grow. People are less likely to stick around if there is a high risk that their favorite communities becomes fractured into isolated instances.
If that was the argument presented I doubt there would be any argument to begin with. Saying ‘hey, you might not want to break connections with site for no reason so your users aren’t surprised or worry that they…so on and so forth’ could be met with a ‘hey, thanks for the advice’ and everyone would have moved on. Accusing them of censorship and attacking someone else’s freedom of speech because you don’t think a personal decision they made was justified because other people utilizing their platform expected something else is a completely different animal.
The onus is on the user to keep track of what the instance they're on is doing. Beehaw behaved in a manner that I don't agree with, so I chose not to sign up there. Lemmy.world has so far defederated from instances I would also choose to defederate from. If the admins ever start defederating willy-nilly without good cause, I'll choose another instance.
I do also think that there needs to be a certain amount of built-in stability in order for federated communities to grow.
I would argue that the Fediverse is inherently more stable than other platforms. The big platforms are defined by inconsistency. If you don't like it, you can take your ball and go home and that's your only choice. The Fediverse lets you take your ball anywhere you want. You don't even need to change apps
I knew nothing about inter-Lemmy-instance-politics when I made my account. I simply made it on a server that was actually not SO overwhelmed that it couldn't make new accounts. I would imagine the same is true of many new users of late.
My Lemmy exerience: We're (heavily) advertised to on Reddit during the pre-blackout mess that we should try Lemmy. I go to try Lemmy. Server is broken. Server is broken. Server is not allowing new users. Server is not allowing new users. Ah! This one actually functions, so I can try Lemmy! Start following and posting, and finding nice communities. Then start finding out that some of these only federate in one direction, so I'm posting to people on another instance who can't see it, because of Lemmy admin bickering and politics. Great, now I need to start over with a new account again, just when I was feeling settled in? Leaves a bad taste, and I was lucky enough to not end up on one of the MOST hated instances.
I hate politics. You can't escape them anywhere involving humans.
This isn't a corporation advertising to get your business it's a collective movement of people working to create a better internet, I totally understand you not liking politics but the reality of this world is that politics is important - the people runnning instances are generally doing it with their own time and money simply because they believe in the importance of the project, of course these are going to be people with strong principles.
Personally I think having a complex ecosystem is going to be a great thing when it's had time to emerge and settle but yeah for now it's all a bit new and up in the air but that's part of the fun
But we need guidance for users to choose an instance before they create an account. Right now, people come in blind, into a minefield of politics. It is very frustrating to walk into that mess and then get reprimanded if you mention it. There is no warning for new users.
Anyway, I don't really care about defederation enough to switch instances. But even if I did, you can't deny that it's annoying. When Lemmy introduces some nice way of migrating to other instances with userdata intact, then your rant will make sense. Without that, I don't think it's wrong if people complain.
I'd like to point out that most people on both sides of the defederation debate are like that. And this instance has been up for months with only LemmyGrad blocked
I feel like these are just growing pains. I mean I'm sure people will argue about to defederate or not for as long as the fediverse exists, but I imagine it'll become background noise as people get accustomed to what the fediverse is and isn't.
The fact that this level of choice exists, both for operaters and for users is a big part what makes these places stand apart from reddit and it's ilk.
Some of us are old enough to remember IRC networks splitting up and the Fediverse de-federation drama feels exactly the same. It is an aspect of human nature that cannot be solved with technical solutions.
It is completely normal for groups of humans to split up and segregate themselves from each other with some individuals belonging to multiple groups simultaneously. It's how we evolved and it's how the Fediverse (and whatever comes after) will evolve going forward.
Every instance is like a political party without exclusivity. You can belong to multiple at once. Rather than working on identity migration my opinion is that they should instead come up with a way for people to login to each other's instances with different accounts. Just like I can login to Disqus or StackExchange with my Google account I should be able to login to Beehaw.org with my programming.dev account and vice versa.
This would be very convenient from an end-user's perspective since they could access posts and comments on the instance where they live and links to communities could be handled in an absolute, universal format and it wouldn't even matter (from the end user's perspective). Because if they loaded /c/whatever on some Lemmy instance or /m/whatever on a Kbin instance they'd still be posting using their Beehaw.org account (or wherever they have an account). Links to external communities could just load those external communities and it wouldn't need so much data to be federated between all instances (e.g. comments and votes).
In regards to moderation: Even if Beehaw.org banned my account from posts/comments that doesn't really have any bearing on whether or not it should accept my account from a login perspective (it's better than having banned users browsing anonymously--because then the instance owners will know they're there). It would also allow moderators at Beehaw.org (or any other instance) to ban specific users from other instances much more easily because those users would likely stay at that other instance rather than have multiple accounts anywhere and everywhere that would also need to be banned.
I'm not sure it's entirely just growing pains. Some of the people arguing for defederation seem to be arguing in bad faith. On the other hand, it seems like they are uniting the community against defederation, which is ultimately a good thing.
A lot of the people arguing to never defederate are the types who smell of "but who is going to read my extremist views if you all defederate my instance, I already got banned everywhere else".
I wonder if people would be interested in a "lurker" instance that disables comments/posts/etc. entirely. A "read-only" instance for the people who really hate the idea of being defederated, lol.
Yes please. I'd rather curate my own and not risk missing content because I didn't realize that some instance admins have beef or are too trigger happy with defederating.
People want to have everything in one place and they bitch and whine when everything in one place ends up getting under control of people who are shitty.
Defederating is a needed part to maintain no party keeps too much control and ruins it for everyone. Remember why most of us left reddit for here? The ability for communities to defederate others will hopefully prevent the shit that happened.
Too far in either direction is bad. If everything completely separate was so great, then there would be no need for federation at all: but actually building a community and creating areas that feel alive is tough to do that way. People don't want to individually manage connecting to random separate servers for each community, and if you didn't connect to the right random server maybe you never even find the community you would have contributed to in positive ways.
Getting rid of hateful stuff is good, in my opinion even though some people will muddy the waters it's really not that hard to determine what constitutes "hateful stuff". But there's also going overboard. "OMG, this server allows open user signups and some random dude signed up and created an unpleasant community. DEFEDERATE THE WHOLE SERVER IMMEDIATELY! IMMEDIATELY!!!"
Maybe a better solution is to have servers publish lists of new communities but not federate them to other servers right away. Maybe they need to reach a certain age and (possibly) be subject to some sort of approval process. That will give the administrator of the server a chance to recognize and deal with the problems before it starts to spread out across the federation. Of course, if someone just lets horrible stuff fester on their server and is unresponsive then by all means it should be defederated.
Right, but there is no central authority to decide the best rules, so we get to live through the process figuring itself out. Go ahead and promote what you consider a good solution, but anyone bitching that this or that platform is inhibiting their free speech by not conforming to the process they propose is just part of the noise, not someone to be taken seriously in the discussion.
Yeah except it's more like a room full of thousands of normal people and you saw two Nazis playing with each others' dicks in the back so you started calling the room a room full of Nazis.
I assume if I stick to Lemmy this is what I'll have to do. I just a basic experience where I can see everything and not have instances arbitrarily blocked on the whim of an admin
The fun part of the fedi is seeing the instance drama. Where before everyone would just yell at the centralized platform corporation, and now we get to yell at the people directly who are trying to filter us out! Usually for good reason.
Seriously. And honestly, even ignoring the super hateful instances, if one server collectively wants to de-federate with another for ANY reason, it is entirely their prerogative. It's funny how many people seem to think that other instances should be FORCED to host others' content, all for their convenience. The level of entitlement there is off the charts.
It literally blows my mind that people seem to think otherwise. Especially since the admins hosting an instance are basically running a charity. If you don't want to be on an instance that occasionally defederates from ones that defend hate speech, then go find a different instance, or start your own.
I have literally been downvoted in one of those posts for pointing out that defederating can not be replaced with per user instance blocking completely (as opposed to having both once per user instance blocking is implemented) because admins want to keep content that is illegal in their jurisdiction out of their instance caches.
-idiots who don't understand the 1st amendment only protects speech from the government, not individuals or corporations and it definitely doesn't protect them from the consequences of their words (never mind the fact that it only applies to one country)
There is a common misunderstanding. First of all, this is a Canadian instance. There is no American constitution ruling over it. Second, free speech is not limited to the American constitution, or to governments. It is a concept that is related to people's ability to express themselves, not necessarily in relation to a governmental power.
The supreme court has also ruled that "the right of the people to peaceably assemble" includes groups telling people they disagree with to leave. Freedom of association includes freedom to not associate
It's a paradox. If people around you are whining, you are somehow banned from speaking up and saying "stop", as that is also whining. Truly, no one can crack this nut
Many instances have already defederated lots of stuff. If you feel strongly about that shouldn't you migrate there over asking other instances to do the same thing? Seems like if he wanted to he would have here by now.
All just feel like fediverse problems and IMO the action should be take ~2 weeks off line and then evaluate there all the shit lands and decide. In thedude's shoes, I would have already pulled the plug on this as way to much hassle to get into the middle of. Props to him for not.
I love my main "hub" instance. It chooses not to federate itself with a lot of the bigger instances, because those are basically the wild west where anything goes.
My dumb mental health is pretty fragile (I'm mad about that), so it's really bad for my mind to see front page content blatantly putting out bait, open hostility, shitty takes, or arguing about loli porn or whatever.
I'm a person who likes my hobbies, animals, goofy memes, and good conversation. I'm glad I can choose to participate in one "safe" instance, and venture to another if I'm feeling the need to explore more content.
I literally have the power to do both! And I'm happy for that choice.
People shouldn't be upset when the power is in their hands to do whatever they want.
Pay attention to the number in the BI and BB columns (respectively Blocked Instances, and Blocked By). Given your requirement, SDF Chatter, Vlemmy and Ante Meridiem seem to be good candidates.
People can run their own instance and choose exactly what to take part in. That's the best solution for now if you are a little bit techy and can run ansible against a Linux server.
The only problem with that is, apart from the technical knowledge required, that the communities feed and past comments are not federated before you manually add them.
Jesus wasn't a carpenter either. He was the son of a carpenter and that more likely translates better to day laborer. It was a reflection of his very humble origins. Being the son of a man in a trade (like a carpenter) would have put him more middle class.
Fully agreed. We are all on the internet, where you can find a link to questionable content anytime. Moderation is usually limiting those links, but (unless your ISP is blocking sth) nobody is cut off from said content. It is just harder to find, and there is no "right" to find content easily.
"interacting with shit content" but I want to see the most controversial instance. I want to see some wild shit. I'm curious of what the bad boys have to say.
If you think regularly interacting with shit content somehow helps you stay out of an echo chamber then go ahead and make a second account on those garbage instances full of hateful people.
So Beehaw has defederated from your home instance, are you implying that Beehaw is the "garbage instances full of hateful people"? Or are you saying that sh.itjust.works is and you tip your fedora to them for recognising it?
Defederation is a powerful tool which will no doubt be abused, especially with lemmy in it's infancy. I just hope that it isn't abused to the point of completely fracturing the lemmyverse, further confusing new users until they just give up and make an account on the "meaverse" (or whatever facebook endup calling it)
The problem is that this and other places were sold as reddit alternatives and they're actually worse than Reddit in that, on Reddit , with one account you could choose what to see and when (akin to controlling your own federation). If you didn't like a mod team you could choose another sub easily. Same account. You could keep looking at the same place too.
Federation at the admin of an instance level means all that has a high cost (account per instance), you don't get to see all at once due to the need to switch accounts and communities are fragmented.
There's also a very clear thin skinned authoritarian attitude that seems to promote bullying against any type of dissent while claiming some sort of moral authority.
Lemmy is broken as a Reddit replacement. By not having the onus on the user but on the admin, and seeing the attitudes from the recommended major instances, it has little chance to generate diverse or interesting content and communities. Just very narrow and small, toe the line places with poor discoverability.
Shame.
Edit: in Reddit communities were above mods. In Lemmy, it's potentially/in practice whiny Mods complaining about anyone in their community that doesn't fully agree with them and having the power to completely ruin their account. Much worse.
Wow this is such a well worded and eloquent comment, exactly the feelings I've had about Lemmy since coming over and why I don't think it will sustain the user count it's seen. Most people that are here are going to end up back at reddit because of this.
The friction is too high each time. Compared to Reddit without offering that much value. Hell, that Blocklist admin is good and owns your user Paradigm makes for very inflexible and circlejerky interactions
Love it or leave means total consent or fuck you. That's not a community. It's a cult.
Buddy, you can always host your own instance. Most places will not de-federate small instances if they don't act inappropriately. This is the only way to build something sustainable that can't be taken away by someone.
Yes. I also can develop my own social website. Both are efforts that are not worth it to undertake to just participate in this environment, which, will make the default barrier of entry a ridiculous one (or an authortiarian minded one).
No. It's not. When the power is on decentralized Ids that the instance doesn't have so much power over, then it will be more interesting. As it stands, it offers actually less than Reddit, which is incredible to me (I'm super onboard with descentralization and user power but this is not user power).
I don't know about right or left, but beehaw looks the most "American" to me. I personally wanna have "All", just without beehaw (as in some exclude post from filter).
Then you can read both the decent servers and the trash ones and be the fedora wearing ackshually right fair and balanced uber nerd you always wanted to be.
Is that what you think it is? For some maybe, but I think it's good to take a look occasionally just to see what they're focusing on. The terminology used. It's more like recon. Know the "enemy".
This. I used to lurk on r/conservative so when the in-laws came to visit I had a response to the bs they spewed. “Did you know Obama is giving every poor person an iPhone?” type stuff.
@[email protected]@[email protected] In that case, you don't need your instance to be federated; if you simply want to check on the latest nonsense, you can directly access the "enemy's" instance. And what's more, you won't have to wonder if their content has been properly federated (missing posts or comments), or if someone from there blocked you.
Right, I guess you would tell immigrants they're free to join another country.
Thanks for calling it "whining" when people engage in conversation about how to organize. You seem nice and tolerant. Not toxic, lover of safe (cruel?) spaces.
Yes, because selling your home and moving your family and all your belongings several hundred miles is exactly equivalent to making a second lemmy account. Expecting sever owners who invest time and money into this to cater to your wants when making a second account is too hard is fair and doesn't come off as whiney behavior at all either.
You're not being cruel to the "garbage trash instances," you're being cruel to your fellow Lemmy-users who you accuse of "whining" as they express their opinions about federation.
Regardless of thoughts on this situation, this is very much not enshittification. Typical it happens as a result of corporate or profit drive. Instances are mostly run by volunteers who just want a good community.