the whole de-federating thing is seriously turning me off to the whole concept of lemmy, it’s like little dictators with their sceptres cutting off entire communities from each other. it’s a major flaw and I hope it gets addressed as lemmy/fediverse evolves, or else it’s not going to work
This is why I’m happy to be on my own private instance and part of what really turned me on to Lemmy. It’s trivial to spin up your own instance if you’re technically inclined. You have complete control over what you see and aren’t subject to some power hungry admin on some server like Beehaw. That’s what makes the fediverse so great imo
I was trying to set up my own 0.17.4 instance for a week. I have used docker professionally. 0.17.4 wasn’t trivial to set up. The instructions were full of errors and omissions. I basically had to rewrite the whole docker-compose.yml myself.
Of course, right when I was at the finish line, they released 0.18.0 and rewrote the instructions, and now it gets you 90% of the way right out of the box. There was still one omission to pull an nginx config file, and then you need to get your own certificate and add it to that config file (or use a reverse proxy, but I have no need for that at the moment).
At least it’s much easier than it was 3 days ago.
If I didn’t already have a bunch of shit running in containers that I don’t want to risk messing up, I would have looked into using their Ansible instructions. But I really don’t like running scripts on my server (especially as root!) unless I know everything that it’s doing.
So you would prefer massive dictators with a profit motive instead? Because that’s the alternative you are advocating for.
The entire point of federation as a tool of decentralisation is to address the issue of Spez, Musk, Zuckerberg and so on. Massive corporate dictators of the internet.
The solution is to split up the massive dictators into lots and lots of smaller ones, who can federate with who they want to in order to make a bigger space, and ultimately provide you with the choice of which approach you like better. It ultimatley allows all of these spaces to shut out corporate advertising as well because if McDonalds ever makes a fucking instance everyone will defederate that shit to get away from the advertising immediately.
If you like the mega dictators better. Reddit is over there. I assume you do not, because that’s why you left it.
Don’t show your ass like this. Don’t do the “oh you like waffles so you hate pancakes???” meme. I didn’t say or suggest a single thing you just said.
What I actually DID say is that allowing
modsadmins to defederate entire communities is stupid. If you want to talk about THAT, fine.EDIT: admins, not mods, my mistake, thanks god
I didn’t say or suggest a single thing you just said.
Of course you did. You said that the defederating thing turns you off the concept of Lemmy, and you advocated for it to be not-a-feature.
You are advocating for centralised mega platforms owned by mega dictators.
The are two options. Centralisation, or decentralisation. That’s it. There is no magic alternative. This is the material reality that exists.
If it turns you off Lemmy, then what you are advocating for is centralisation. The literal polar opposite of what the entire fediverse aims to be and exists to solve. There is not an alternative and there will not be. You either get one owner of a super site or thousands of owners of minisites that federate in order to be emulate a supersite without the oversight. That’s it. There is no third-way.
Admins* defederate instances*. Mods only have power inside their /c/ community.
What I actually DID say is that allowing mods admins to defederate entire communities is stupid. If you want to talk about THAT, fine.
I think you’re really misunderstanding a lot about the fediverse if you think everyone must federate with everyone. Choosing who you federate with is a fundamental part of the design. It means communities can choose their own ways to operate, and we don’t have to apply universal rules to everyone.
If a bunch of nazis want to run a server and post racist shit all day we can’t stop them. But we can (and should) defederate from them. They can have their own private island. If someone wants to run a “safe” server for (e.g) LGBTQI+ and defederate from some of the big instances, they should be able to do it.
If you want to be in a community that allows almost everything except racism, and other horrible shit, and federates with almost all servers then there are plenty of servers that support that. You are free to choose that. That freedom to choose is a massive feature (not flaw) of the fediverse.
You can argue it should be user-level, and again that’s something you can choose. But there will be servers almost everyone wants to defederate from, and don’t want to leave it up to user-level blocking because new users will see horrible shit as soon as they log on for the first time.
If a bunch of nazis want to run a server and post racist shit all day we can’t stop them. But we can (and should) defederate from them. They can have their own private island.
And what if they post racist shit all day on their own instance but also post normal and helpful stuff on communities of other instances? Just don’t visit their communities, that’s it. No need to block potentially helpful posts of members of that instance everywhere.
The same thing when there’s a NSFW and your own instance doesn’t want to see NSFW stuff. That’s fine but it’s not like the users of that NSFW instance are running around posting porn on every other community.If some of them do, block the users. But there’s no reason defederating the whole instance because those users can and do also participate just fine in other topics that have nothing to do with NSFW or nazi stuff.
For example why should a programmer that has a nazi instance as his home not be allowed to post memes in a community about programming humour from a regular instance, when he doesn’t post anything there that is in any way related to him being a nazi?
“What if the Nazis are actually good people who are misunderstood” is certainly a take
Not what I said, but okay…
So you think that being a nazi automatically means that every view you have on anything is bad by default or that you are not able to participate in any normal conversations that don’t touch that topic, like technology or gaming, without writing racist stuff?
Because that would be the only reason defederation would be justified in my eyes.
In any other case, just don’t visit their home instance.Yes I do. You’re welcome to find or create instances that do tolerate Nazis. But I think most people want them defederated immediately. Saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to have that option is ridiculous, and technically impossible.
it’s a major flaw and I hope it gets addressed as lemmy/fediverse evolves, or else it’s not going to work
Defederation is an important tool for admins (e.g. if a server full of nazis appears, we want it to be defederated immediately).
Hopefully admins realise over time it’s stupid to defederate over trivial stuff, and it causes users to revolt and possibly a decline in your server’s activity.
Also, make sure you complain to your admin if they do this, or just leave and go to a new server.
(e.g. if a server full of nazis appears, we want it to be defederated immediately).
This seems obvious to everyone else, but not to me. Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
If Nazi content is something you don’t want blocked, then I recommend you find a different instance because not many people will share your values here.
No one is stopping you from joining a server full of Nazis.
Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel aren’t “just another reasonable point of view that deserves to be heard”Nice to meet another vegan in the wild.
Not contributing to the debate necessarily, I’d just like to take a moment to say:
Tbf, if you don’t like “Those openly avocating violence and cruelty towards others who are being neither violent or cruel,” then you’ll want to be on an instance that defederates lemmygrad and lemmy.ml. Before the reddit exodus this place was almost entirely genocide denialiasts who support Cuba, China, Russia (incl. the current invasion and simping for the USSR), and who want to literally murder all small business owners and landlords even if they only rent out their spare room or an old townhouse from before they got married for some extra income to help pay for meds in retirement, but no matter, “bourgeoisie.”
The only reason they aren’t so prominent today is the flood drowned them out a bit, they’re still very much here, and they’re no better than the Nazis, and the kicker is they both think they’re the good guys lol.
Edit: Hehe downvotes mean nothing here, but I can see I upset a few of those genocide denialists and that makes me happy.
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Why would anyone want to stay connected to a Nazi community, except for the obvious reasons?
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Nothing prevents people from just creating new accounts on another instance of lemmy - ban evasion is trivial.
If you’re uncomfortable with this feel free to set up your own server.
Nazis aren’t the point. Censorship is. Hard to see how a community that requires an individual federated server for everyone to avoid censorship is going to eventually come close to the popularity of Reddit.
If reddit had had /r/NationalSocialism and /r/ChildPornography and refused to ban them, I don’t think it would’ve become as popular as it is.
It called them /r/jailbait and /r/the_donald.
Still not the point.
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The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
So if one instance is filled with illegal content, the admins of all federated instances must remove it on their instances to avoid law enforcement kicking down their doors.If there is too much illegal content on one instance to effectively moderate manually, defederation is the solution.
This is beside the fact, that some might have their own additional non-legally mandated requirements for content they host on their platform.
The problem for those operating a Lemmy instance is that they are hosting copies of the content of all federated instances.
If that’s genuinely the way it works, it seems really dumb.How would you do it?
Fetch data from instances you’re trying to access, rather than hosting everything on all servers. That seems like a quick way to get half the fediverse defederated from each other.
That’s exactly what happens. But you have to store the fetched data on your instance if you want to display it there.
Authority deciding what you see? You mean like Reddit does? With Lemmy you can always change servers, heck, even set up your own server with your own rules.
Yes, exactly like Reddit does. How does a federated system manage when everyone is required to run their own server to avoid censorship?
Not everyone is required to do so. You just need to find a server that aligns with your values. Communities always censor content, one way or another. Call it moderation. Otherwise, you end up a piling piece of burning trash.
our worse, like 4chan
Why would we want to do that instead of just dealing with them one by one when needed or just individually blocking communities/users?
Who would be “dealing with them one by one”? People seem to keep forgetting that lemmy, both the code and the infraatructure, is developed and maintained by hobbyists, not by a company.
I’m extremely uncomfortable with an authority deciding for me what I may see in my feed and what not.
You should really think about this, in my opinion, entiteled attitude… You are not the one paying for the server, you are not the one running the server you are certainly not the one who will have to deal with potential legal actions if illegal shit is going on on your instance…
You are not entiteled to any of this… You don’t have to pay in any way for any of it and lemmy admins don’t earn any money from you…
Imagine not only getting into trouble for a hobby, but have random people complain about “authority” because you don’t want to/can’t deal with potentially illegal shit on your server…
If you are so concerned about “authority” and about “what you see on your feed”, start your own server and federate with whoever you want, or start a server that is collectively owned and controlled by it’s users or something like that… You can very very easily do that…
Obviously the admins need to deal with content that’s illegal. I’m not talking about that.
Spreading Nazi propaganda is illegal in some countries… The amount of moderation necessary would be unsustainable. And Nazis tend to propagate violence anyway, which is illegal in most places.
And why is it so important to allow Nazis to “share their views” on your platform anyway? What possible benefit could this bring to a platform?
This whole comment is the reason Lemmy won’t take off
What exactly is the reason? That Nazis are not allowed? You seriously think not allowing Nazis on the platform will kill it?
I’m worried about that. And every time, they either mention nazis as an excuse, or suggest creating your own instance. I think fragmentation of users and content is only going to promote centralized platforms.
People have been “worried about that” for the Fediverse for years. It hasn’t stopped it growing.
The main question is “what is the alternative?”. The only alternatives are corporate social media (e.g. Reddit), where you’re even more at the mercy of the admins, or some kind of peer to peer approach which may take off one day, but hasn’t really got going yet.
You seem to be saying that moderation actions should be performed against users, not instances. You’re not getting that instances ARE users. On a network where anyone can create an instance, and then as many accounts on that instance as they like, moderating accounts from a hostile instance is POINTLESS.
No, I’m saying I dont want a 3rd party pre-selecting the content I’m allowed to see. I want to make the choices myself
If you don’t want someone to decide who you can connect with, you can spin your own instance. Otherwise every instance has admins that aren’t you
Everyone here says to run your own server, as if that’s the mindset that’s going to bring in users and increase the popularity of federation. A little short-sighted.
No, they say that IF you want to have control over what instances yours federates with, then fucking put up, pay for the server, and make those decisions. Otherwise, pay an admin to do it for you, or be happy with what you get.
I don’t think the goal is to increase the popularity at the moment. I think it’s manage the chaos. The fediverse has had a massive increase over the past few days and you kind of need to use the emergency tools that are part of federations to manage that growth.
I mean I’m just one person but I’m here to stay and if it shrinks or grows I don’t really care I just know I don’t want to go back to Reddit. I also like the ability to defederate as I’ve seen that reddit has had a long history of allowing bad actors to go untouched because they’ve never broken an actual rule.
Now imagine that chaos, but everyone is running their own server. There are already posts and replies that won’t accept my votes.
Who’s a bad actor? Liberals? Conservatives? Who gets to decide who the bad actor is?
Lemmy needs to allow Server-managers to defederate other servers due to obviously illegal material. And Lemmy needs to allow Users to block or ignore servers just due to any number of reasons. But the decision should be left to the user.
I’m 100% anti-censorship, and if a Server is going to be run that way there needs to be a way for existing users and new users to know that. And that’s the problem because a lot of new users are already stressed at picking a server.
There’s a big difference between opposing censorship and insisting that private individuals must platform whatever speech you say they should. The difference is so great it is hard to believe you are arguing in good faith.
Isn’t that a bit of hyperbole? If it was turning into what you said we’d be seeing a far greater amount of servers than we are.
The point of the fediverse is decentralization. That means if you have a predominant rigid viewpoint you can find an instance that shares that view. I don’t think at the current state of development that the fediverse can have a dominating instance that connects everything. It’s up to you to create a community you feel is missing on the instance you’ve settled in if no other federated instances have that community.
We’ve proven through Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter that we suck at communicating across groups on social media and are more interested in insulting whoever disagrees with us than communicatimg effectively.
That being said the Fediverse is young. Things aren’t perfect. It’s still less censored than almost any other social media platforms aside from 4chan and I’d urge you to use that if you are looking for anti-censorship.
For myself, I’ve picked out a dozen instances and I drift between them all while I figure this out. I treat it just like my half dozen alt accounts I had on RiF.
Everyone missing the point because the example is “Nazis”. It doesn’t matter what it is, I don’t want someone else deciding what I can see. Unless it causes legal problems for the server, don’t censor me.
Individual servers isn’t the quick answer everyone seems to think it is.
Then join a server that federates with everyone no matter what
Different instances have different ideologies. You can get a user on “everything-conservative” which blocks half if the federation, or you can get into a free for all instance which allows all. Big generic instances like lemmy.world do have a big problem on their hands, they have to make the bubble the common denominator of all users, which is hard to know.
Individual servers isn’t the quick answer everyone seems to think it is.
It might not be quick, but it’s probably the only answer. You can’t both have someone else run and be responsible for a server that you use and expect them to do everything exactly like you’d want it. Especially if doing it your way might result in significantly more work for them.
That’s true for Lemmy as it is for Reddit and any other service on the internet that you use, but don’t run yourself. The only difference with federated services like Lemmy is that there’s at least the possibility of just doing it yourself.
People can block communities right? That might make more sense than just severing connections to other servers completely?
Tell that to admins with strong opinions, and other admins who don’t wanna anger admins with strong opinions and get defederated for not defederating the offenders.
See, that would be such a better option. Let individual users block servers from appearing for them alone in any interactive sense. The Beehaw defederation was not only terrible timing, but it exposed the biggest achilles heel of this whole idea.
Can you elaborate more on this? Its a tangent, but one I’m out of the loop on.
Why DID beehaw split?
I’m not fully in the know on this by any means, but from what I understand, Beehaw’s admins/mods decided to defederate from sh.itjustwor.ks and lemmy.world because of an inability to moderate effectively due to the massive influx of new Lemmy users last week - most of which were in those two instances, as they have open registration.
Beehaw requires you to apply to join.
How would splitting off fix that problem, though? If 100k users joined beehaw, and they stop syncing with the rest of the federation, they still have 100k new users to moderate.
Or am I looking at this backwards, and they want their gated garden, absent of slugs?
Beehaw would not let 100k users into their platform to start with. They will grow according to their means to moderate. That’s why they only allow sign-ups through application, go bring down the number of new sign-ups and filter by quality.
I think there’s definitely a bit of a gated-garden mentality here, but it’s mostly just being overwhelmed. If they had more help, or had ASKED for more help, it would probably have been much different. I’m new here myself so I’m not going to pretend to understand the nuances here.
Eh, if it were easier to block an instance as a user, I’d be 100% with you instead of 95%.
There are instances that are batshit crazy. Since blocking an instance as a user just ain’t possible yet, I can see why defederation before trouble gets going is useful. Once the nasty side of the internet gets snowballing, it’s much harder to manage.
Troll, or serious extremist, some things are just cancerous.
This is a good point
I mean I’d rather people have freedom over their property (aka their servers) than one entity be able to dictate to the entirety of lemmy.
If I set up a server my instance will have my rules. I won’t allow NSFW nor will I allow any hate speech or promotion of extremist views such as nazism, fascism, imperialism, anything encouraging violence or threats, religious extremist beliefs such as sharia law and fundamental Christianity etc.
I would not federate with any instances that break MY rules. That’s why it’s my instance. I made it, maintain it. My interest isn’t getting as many people on my instance as possible but to give a space for people who want to participate on that kind of instance. Some instances will focus on hating LGBT and being sexist etc and while that’s horrific they’re allowed to do whatever as long as it doesn’t break lemmy TOS which i honestly don’t know what it is. Anyway, it’s weird to see anyone label freedom to do what one wants with their property as being dictators.
There is no lemmy TOS by the way. There is no central authority to all of this. Much like real life, people tend to stay away from the weirdos and in the fediverse they just defederate from a group of weirdos if it becomes too bad.
But to be honest, defederation is an absolutely minor inconvenience. Most important instance will of course cooperate and have similar rules. It’s just that we are on a very young platform right now and the moderation tools are not as advanced as elsewhere. Currently, defederation is just a temporary band-aid solution to make the admin’s lifes easier. It’ll get better and sort itself out over time.
If you like spreading hate, you will of course always have a problem with defederation. You likely won’t be able to participate in normal discussions on normal instances as well as vile portrayals of humanities’ worst with the same account. But that’s not a new concept. People have had two accounts for normal discussion and things like NSFW subs before.
You and me both. Presumably a lot of others as well.
Feels like Lemmy is going to shoot itself in the foot with this.
It seems inevitable!
Yep, I feel the same way. Feels like I’m missing out on a bunch of stuff.
thankfully, that isn’t really the case on your (which also happens to be my) instance.
we’ve been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de, for having open signups, which i’m sure is something we could hash out with them in the future. (technically there are also instances that block us which are run by single persons for their own use. in effect, this amounts to a single user blocking us for themselves, which obviously is fine).
we ourselves have defederated from precisely one instance - lemmygrad.ml, the political one for authoritarian communists. this was probably done to avoid unpleasant political spam posts from showing up. personally, i think we could get rid of even this one block as the users can decide whether to block that instance for themselves or not; i might post asking about it later.
and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues. this statement more than anything really made me feel like i chose the right instance.
FMHY for the win!
we’ve been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de
Which also was my first home instance until I noticed that a comment chain I accidentaly started using another lemmy instance was not visible when looking at the thread though feddit. Not even my own comments made with an instance that wasn’t blocked. Turns out the user I answered to start that chain was a member of your instance and thus the comment and everything following it was not visible for feddit users.
Which is why I’m a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^
and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues.
That’s the policy of lemm.ee too. It has 34 blocked instances right now but those are all suspicious ones that formed and got >30K users within a couple hours and no activity at all.
But ultimately, new users shouldn’t have to worry about such things, which is why I can’t see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.
Everywhere it says it’s not relevant where you sign up because you can see all the stuff from other instances anyway, but that’s simply not true, it DOES matter where you sign up and even after that you could be forced to change your instance when the defederation roulette starts spinning again.and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues.
Hey jas sh.itjust.works actually been defederated with many major instances yet or are there just murmurs? I’m confused what happens because I’m on lemmy.ml and I still see sh.itjust.works content, but then I’m actively subscribed to some communities there. My understanding with defederation is that you no longer see anything from a given instance in the “all” section vs the “local” section (where you only have seen stuff from your home instance anyway). That makes sense, but what about my subscriptions. If I’m actively subscribed do I still get content from defederated instances or is that all just gone?
No no, nothing happened. It was all angry discussion by crowds who didn’t know anything. The problems were solved very fast and no one ended up unhappy except for the troll.
It sucks because Sh.itjustworks is generally a pretty good place, people trying some good things like the Agora. Then I take a look a few minutes later and it’s like the Donald Glover pizza meme all over again.
People in this thread look like they never mada a mistake doing something for the first time.
You are all perfect, but our admins are awful.
They also don’t have experience in running this federation thing like we don’t have in using it.
This is all in R&D mode, both for code and for running community.
Express your opinions, since that is the only way things can change, but have some understanding for people running the show.
thank god someone else is finding humor in this too. i laughed at the sheer absurdity of half the comments in that thread. people can really easily lose all sense of proportion
Any link to that thread? I’m out of the loop
https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/265796
here you go, keep in mind that it’s 2 days old so probably best not to comment on it and shake up a pot that’s now settled. just sit back, read and laugh instead
(wish i could give you a properly formatted link that would load the post in your instance instead of booting you off-site, but as of now i don’t think there’s syntax that lets you share proper links to posts, like there is with communities. does each instance just number every post on the network by itself? so far that’s what it’s been looking like to me)
no problem, the connection between instances are still kinda awkward anyways, I won’t be able to see whole thing. Thanks for the link, I’mma grab a popcorn real quick.
