2y ago

lemmy.fmhy.ml's stance on defederation

Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.

I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don't find appealing (there's even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).

We don't want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.

72 comments

I just want to be able to control what I see. I have no desire to control what other people see and I sure as fuck don't want other people to control what I see.
That's it. That's my entire position on the matter.
- I am dismayed with how many people want to control what others can see.
- Beehaw defederated because of users, not communities though. They wanted to control who could comment, not what people could see.
  
  Their intent is irrelevant to my point.

I will say that I sometimes like to visit controversial communities due to curiosity, and to be amazed at all the insane and braindead things people say. Furthermore, I don't like living in a bubble, and knowing what people I disagree with say/think is important to forming well-informed opinions. So sometimes I do like to subscribe to communities on even places like lemmygrad just for those reasons. It's annoying when instances block controversial instances, because controversy often interesting and very lurkable. I understand why those places are blocked, and I definitely don't want to see fascist bs on my feed all the time. But I wish I could have the best of both worlds.
I wanna decide what I get to see. It would be cool if the instances could be blocked on a followers-only basis. Like, blocked for the all feeds, blocked in general. But not for me if I follow it.
I actually chose this instance in large part because it only blocks one other one lol
- I'll echo this sentiment. I also lurk communities that I don't agree with, and I want to see dissenting views. I find that heavy moderation often just leads to echo chambers where real issues can be kicked under the rug
- Are we not capable of hiding things we don't want to see on Lemmy ourselves? Why would I want to be babysat by anyone when I can make adult choices on what I want to see my own damn self? Censorship was what ruined Reddit years ago. Leave it entirely up to the users.

Just throwing my opinion in... Since we can block communities on our own, we don't really need someone to decide which to block for us. I mean, it's not my instance, so you can do whatever you want, and I actually might've decided to block lemmygrad.ml myself, but I'd still rather see the posts and make that determination myself.
- Completely agree with this. I can block anything I don't want to see, and I'd rather not have someone else decide that for me
  
  Can you blanket block comments from other instances users?
  I am not a fan of Beehaw's decision, but I can't a setting where you can actually do this.

In my point of view it's a kind of censorship. Just let the user himself decide what he wants to see.
- I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're a second language speaker where "user" is a masculine noun, but other genders exist lol. I encourage you to use "themselves" instead.
  
  Akchually, since we're being annoyingly corrective, shouldn't it be "themself"?
  OR is it able-ist to assume the commentor does not express multiple personalities?
  
  A bit facetious innit
  Live and let live
  
  Yea okay. In German you mostly use the masculine noun

Thx admin chief 👍👍

I very much appreciate this philosophy. It looks like this is the right instance for me :)

I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances
I personally disagree. There will be entirely private instances, there will be instances with highly restricted federation. There will be instances that federate with most and there will be instances that federate without restriction. That's the beauty of the model and that's why kbin and lemmy with thrive.

So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
Why is lemmygrad blocked, but not exploding heads?
- Because lemmygrad is a tankie hellhole. They support all kinds of authoritarian nonsense.
  
  That doesn't answer the question.
- Is there a place to see what's blocked, and why?

I sort of agree, but I also know that as Lemmy becomes more popular, defederating will become necessary as trolls and hate groups open instances. It's a problem on Mastodon. A trans friend there posted about her experience bra shopping and a bunch of transphobes from other Mastodon servers came in to attack her, including an admin of one server who called her a slur and told her to stop reporting because they'd never remove anything hateful towards trans people.
On a centralized service like Reddit, hate subs can just be quarantined by the admins or removed wholesale. With a decentralized service, every instance will need to defederate those groups to keep them out. There's no way to bar them from making a new server.
- It's important to choose your home wisely.
  I have an account here on kbin.social, but I also wanted a dedicated lemmy account. I chose fmhy because it aligns with what I want: hearing every voice, for better or for worse. I considered beehaw due to their large gaming community, but I read about their philosophy and saw that they were trying to create more of a safe space for their users (suspicion recently confirmed). If someone wants a more positive experience without having to worry about trolling and harassment, beehaw would be the better choice. I am personally fine with treading through sludge to find hidden gems, so I made my own choice.
  Bear in mind that defederation isn't bidirectional. If beehaw decides to defederate fmhy, I don't care, I can still see gaming@beehaw and interact with users that live on instances still federated with my own. But the beehaw users are safe from from troll-friendly hosts, so everybody wins. This isn't true, as pointed out by zinklog. It can still be worked around by having accounts in multiple places, but even with the eventual account migration feature, this makes it impossible for anyone to see everything in any one place. Maybe this can be fixed in the future, as the fediverse continues to develop?
  To directly map it to the example of your friend, if she chose to live on an instance more like beehaw, she would still be able to interact with the federated community at large, but be better shielded. If someone tried to throw slurs at her from an instance with a lower standard, she wouldn't see it at all, and the person delivering the slurs likely wouldn't even realize it.
  
  Correct me if I'm wrong but it's my understanding that defederation is in fact bidirectional. lemmy.world can't see new posts from beehaw after the announcement.
  Comment based on this post
- I think it's different with Lemmy since people make posts in communities and it's in the community moderator's power to remove problematic comments.
  If an entire instance supports or encourages such behaviour though, then you're right and such instances should be defederated.

Thanks for that. I tried to subscribe to some German communities on Feddit just to find out that they blocked our instance on their end. Fuck them I guess, I'm staying here.

Nice to see admins with a level head

thank you for not being a drama queen and railroading this whole thing by leveraging the small amount of power you have to make some bullshit point about your social views.

A little bit late to the party here. What is the reason why lemmygrad.ml is blocked?
- Very tanky ultra left pro Russia, pro China, anti everyone else part of Fediverse.
  Check them out if you like but they only talk shit about the West and NATO. Put another way, you are not missing much by avoiding them.
  
  They also support North Korea!

I honestly don't see anything of value being lost. They can wall off into their own echochamber and the rest of us can communicate freely.
- This is not a matter of different point of view but a moderation one, since they are outnumbered for now with flow of new people and bad actors.
  I don't think they did it happily
  But we're not concerned since this instance is smaller and probably not as much targeted
  
  This is not a matter of different point of view but a moderation one, since they are outnumbered for now with flow of new people and bad actors.
  I don't agree. They appear to have a lot more moderators than kbin.social or lemmy.world. They didn't have any higher number of trolls. What they want is to remove more comments. Comments which they think offend people. This is all about a point of view. They want a safe space. An echo chamber. They want to be protected from diversity.

Why did lemmygrad get blocked?
- It's full of tankies (fascists who like the color red).
  
  Does that mean exploding heads will get defederated?
  
  You really have bo idea what you're talking about, do you... have you even visited the communities in lemmygrad?

- Click the link and find out
- all the tankies.

Thanks for this. It's recomforting and makes me thing I chose the right instance to sign up

as a kbinaut, may I ask why everyone feels it's important to block lemmygrad? here on kbin we're still federated with them and things seem fine?
- Because basically, everyone got scared from them being communists/socialists and just decided to defederate from them.
  It's nothing more than fear based on years of propaganda pushed by western countries, nothing more. They don't defederate from anyone, yet everyone feels the need to defederate from them. Yes, they do have leftist views, they do think the world of many current and ex communist leaders, but if you don't like that, you can just block their communities 🤷.
  Other than that, their communites are mostly like everyone else's, politics, memes, piracy, comics, etc. They even have a few LGBTQ+ dedicated communities and about 20% of them are LGBTQ+ acording to a recent demographic survey they had (you can find it in their main community), so... basically, they're human, just like the rest of us.
  Many of them are well informed, not to mention highly educated, so I can see why there is fear amongst other instances - a debate starts, most people will flop regarding info, facts, whatever, they'll have the upper hand in the debate, so why actually try and listen to what they've got to say, they're just tankies anyway - defederate 🤷.
  If you don't like their communities, just block them, no need to defederate from them... at least I can't see a reason.
  
  They support North Korea for goodness sake. Being communists isn't the problem, it's that they support fascist dictatorships pretending to be communist.
  
  I don't know why you're insisting people who don't like lemmygrad are anti-communists. Not all communists are pro-stalin tankies.
  
  Lemmygrad is specifically problematic for being predominantly Marxist Leninist (as the .ml suggests). I think you're probably right that people just reject them outright because of AH THE COMMUNISTS WANT TO END CAPITALISM red scare type stuff present in Western countries, but where I specifically find Lemmygrad (and other tankies) being way too negative to interact with is when they get into defending Communist regimes.
  If you asked the average Lemmygrad user, they too would be enveloped in propaganda, though this time coming from communist regimes and praxis they've read. They have been deluded into believing Stalin and Mao were good leaders, that authoritarianism is okay if it advances their favorite political agenda (though for some reason also claim that these countries aren't authoritarian), and that these regimes should be implemented everywhere.
  The worst of it all is their constant genocide denial. Yes, the USA and other Western countries have done a similar amount (maybe even more?) of really bad stuff in this area (e.g. natives, apartheids, roma, etc. 💀), but I think broadly a well educated Western citizen, especially a leftist one, should be able to understand and admit that what their country did was wrong and should never be done again. A Lemmygrad user instead defends things like the Uighur genocide and Holodomor, saying both that they don't exist and are "western propaganda" while at the same time entertaining the counterfactual and saying if they did happen it was justified because the West did it too and they were being very mean to communism 😡.
  When you get to that level of malevolent stupidity, you start to look more and more like a fascist that supports genocide and absolute power of the state and that uses strategic ambiguity to express your toxic beliefs, than you do a leftist. I don't think anyone suggests we stay federated with a fascist instance because fascists are misunderstood after "years of propaganda pushed by western countries" to discredit Hitler and Mussolini, but here you are doing the moral equivalent.

Fuck beehaw!

72 comments