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
3So 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.
1Don'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
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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.
1(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.
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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
1I 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.
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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.
0This is a good point
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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.
0There 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.
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Yep, I feel the same way. Feels like I'm missing out on a bunch of stuff.
0thankfully, 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!
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People can block communities right? That might make more sense than just severing connections to other servers completely?
0Tell 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.
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You and me both. Presumably a lot of others as well.
Feels like Lemmy is going to shoot itself in the foot with this.
0It seems inevitable!
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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.
1Hey 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?
1No 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.
0It 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.
1
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
0Any link to that thread? I'm out of the loop
0https://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)
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