2y ago

Suggestion: asking for the community's thoughts before defederating with an instance

It'd be nice if the admins got everyone's input on these sorts of things. Admins making decisions without thought to our opinions is what drove us here from reddit. I'm not going to lose sleep over hexbear defederation in particular, but it's a disconcerting precedent.

I know I can just leave to another instance, but I've started !streetwear@lemmy.world here and don't want to have to move that too 😓

(Apologies if this isn't the place to share suggestions. Also I do appreciate the hard work the admins are doing. My sincere thanks!!)

28 comments

I disagree.
I think it is users job to find an Instance that does things in a way they will approve of. It is not the owners job, who does all the work and maintains the hardware, to make sure their users are happy with all their decisions.
You are not locked onto World, and actually, it has far too many users already, enough to unbalance all of Lemmy. Rather than pressure Ruud to try to make the individuals here happy, I think they should simply feel encouraged to leave.
You can access all the content here from almost any other of the hundreds of Instances.
- I mean, they're voicing a position, much like you do. It's important to not just have 'exit' approaches, 'voice' is important as a contribution to the development of a community. That doesn't mean that an owner should be beholden to the users, but it's perfectly fine to have dynamism and exchange in what instances are. We construct them collectively, and over time.
  
  I agree. But that should be up to Ruud, not us. I have no interest in seeing any attempts at direct democracy here.
  It's not like these communities are even remotely secure. We should remember full well that there are plenty of people out there that want the Fediverse project to fail. Strongly enough to perform attacks. They are certainly attempting more conventional trolling techniques, that should be a given, as its also an effective way to harm a community. From within.
  No conversation on here is exclusively people that want Lemmy to succeed, and thus cannot be fully trusted. Ruud, on the other hand, has managed to earn my trust so far with his financial disclosures and open communication style.
- Instead of pushing back against your opinion, I must confess what you said would work if there was a seamless way to move accounts and communities from one instance to another. Unfortunately that's currently not the case.
  It's also worth noting that an instance itself can change philosophy. It seems .world is moving from generic Lemmy to pro-world bank/imf/NATO Lemmy. I'm not necessarily for or against any of that, but I signed up for a generic Lemmy, not an echo chamber.
  
  On your first point, there are tools already for migrating accounts although still in their early stages. For example, https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim allows you to move subs and blocks to a new account in another instance, but not posts and comments. I don’t think there’s a tool yet to move a community as a mod though.
  
  People have freedom on the Fediverse. That's all there is to it. If people want to support a particular view on a particular Instance that they own, then they should be able to do that. Users that disagree with it are free to organize themselves in a different way.
  This is vastly preferable to trying to control the behavior of one admin, simply because he happened to grow large the quickest. He should have the same freedom that we do, since none of us are forced to remain here on the server that he owns.
- That works if the instance openly expresses a general policy on defederating , and then adheres to their own policy. Based on the whole pre-emptive threads defederation that many other instances took part in, but lemmy.world did not, it seemed like they were aiming to be a very open instance - their stated reason for not cutting ties with threads was to have a wait and see approach and actually give them a chance before assuming it will be a problem (and it’s not like meta has a stellar track record either). Now with hexbear they are taking an immediate defederation, no chances approach. It would be nice to get some clarity on the general criteria for pre-emptive and reactive defederation in order to make those home instance decisions.
  
  I will admit I was deeply disappointed that we were not promised that we would defederate from any and all Meta properties. I would still like to see that promised.
  I frankly just don't care how much good it will or won't do.
- I think it is users job to find an Instance that does things in a way they will approve of.
  You're missing the forest for the trees here. If this sort of "defederation because I feel like it" shit catches on, the whole concept of the fediverse will not work. You can go to another instance, sure, but what if the admin of the instance that you just left desides they don't want to federate with the instance that you're going to join. Maybe they decide to be like Beehaw and make every instance that wants to federate meet their standards first.
  The idea that users can just leave and find another instance only works if all instances are connected and being administrated fairly and unbiasedly. Increasingly that looks like it's not going to be the reality, which means leaping around instances is going to result in hitting a lot of invisible walls.
  
  This is just fear mongering to me. Just because some people defederate with some other people, does not mean everyone will suddenly start defederating with everyone.
  That's just a slippery slope argument, and no better than the rest of them. There is no reason the behavior would suddenly spread everywhere, especially given how much of the Fediverse shares your exact opinion.
  I haven't seem any polling, but it seems fairly close to a 50/50 split between people who strongly disagree with defederation vs those that do not. That is plenty of people to keep most of the service federated.

I keep wondering how people think like this.
Lemmy is not a democracy. Reddit wasn't either.
We don't own shit, we don't pay for infrastructure, we don't deal with ddos attacks and database overloads, and reports and all the other shit that comes with running an instance.
What we have is the freedom to move. That's it. If a given instance wants to experiment with democracy, that's awesome! But lets be real, committees and large bodies move slow. You will eventually run into something that requires quick action, and it comes back to whoever pays the bills to do it.
In this case, we had an instance preparing to federate, and the announcement post made there was full of people specifically planning to fuck up every other instance. They didn't hide it, it wasn't hard to find, it wasn't coded or otherwise obfuscated.
That is exactly time for a rapid, preemptive decision.
This situation is absolutely nothing like what happened on reddit.
- If a given instance wants to experiment with democracy, that’s awesome!
  Agreed and that's what I'm suggesting lemmy.world do. They don't have to, but it'd be nice if they did, even informally. A simple, "Hey, what do y'all think?" would be nice, before they make a decision that significantly impacts our collective experience.
  As for preemptively defederating from trolls, I can appreciate the argument, and if that was the only justification given, I wouldn't be so concerned. But the admins also cited political opinions that fly in the face of their own branding: a "generic" instance "for the entire world to use". Had they included "you must love the World Bank and IMF", I wouldn't have joined this instance in the first place, just like I didn't join beehaw. It's not that I hate those orgs, but I don't want to be in an echo chamber.
- Dude, no one is suggesting we own anything, but having a conversation about how the largest instances operate, when how they operate directly affects so much of Lemmy as a whole, is not uncalled for.
  We're also speaking up because if the admins of an instance are not going to adhere to a code or a standard, best to know now before communities get settled in.

I know I can just leave to another instance, but I’ve started !streetwear@lemmy.world here and don’t want to have to move that too 😓
You can transfer moderation rights to remote accounts as well, no need to move it. Although I would probably not yet delete your lemmy.world account because remote moderation is still a bit buggy at times.
- So would anti-world bank/imf folks be able to share their outfits on !streetwear@lemmy.world if .world hosts the community but I moderate it from some other instance? I have my doubts, but I'm no expert on the fediverse. I want to see everyone's streetwear, not just from people of a particular political alignment.

you should definitely move instances.
do you think it's likely that .world is gonna take a wait and see approach when they've already signaled intent to exclude instances along ideological lines and then gone ahead and done it?
you rejected reddit because of power tripping mods and admins. reject the places that seek to emulate that environment.
e: a lot of people were talking in the other thread about jumping ship to .ee. idk what their deal is but maybe itll be a little more even handed for you. .ml is also an option, but you will miss out on the places that defederated it.

So you want the hexbear trolls all over this instance?
- This isn't about hexbear in particular. It's about how these decisions are made. But for the record, if hexbear users actually started trolling en masse, I'd be in favor of defederation.
  
  They didn't spring up from nothing, it's a r/CTH (sub responsible for a lot of trolling and brigading) successor instance. We don't have to pretend to not know who they were on Reddit, especially when statements from their admin still support "war on liberalism in the Fediverse" and won't punish users banned from other instances "for being an asshat". It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and literally came from a duck. We can put two and two together.

Defederation should happen after an instance has created a problem, so the community can actually have an opinion to voice that isn't based on speculation.
I know we aren't talking law here, but still, there needs to be a crime before we can have a trial. There needs to be evidence of wrong doing and harm created.
This preemptive judging does not inspire confidence in Lemmy as a whole. There has to be a standard, and I don't believe admins pre-judging instances before anything has even happened is healthy going forward. This is an extreme slippery slope and the more normalized it gets, the faster the ideal of fediverse dies.

28 comments