I hereby name thee Chaosbringer

286 comments

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
- 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.
- 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.
  
  These are good points but apparently it was just a community on that instance... The instance itself wasn't the problem. You can in fact block a community as a user. People absolutely have the power to block the_Donald community on that instance on their own.
  
  Because some problems require a hammer and others require orbital nukes...
  
  This is a good point
  
  Since blocking an instance as a user just ain’t possible yet
  I don't think that would solve the legal issue so it doesn't really matter in many cases. Even if you personally blocked an instance, your home instance will still recieve copies of that instance as long as someone else is interacting with it. And with that comes the fear of unintentionally hosting something illegal on your instance becasue you have the copies from that other instance.
  So again there would be no other solution than defederating.
- People can block communities right? That might make more sense than just severing connections to other servers completely?
  
  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.
  
  You’d think the concept of letting users choose their instance would also apply to letting the user choose to block or not. It’s not like the entire instance is full of Donald users, just one crappy part of it.
  
  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.
- 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.
- O no, the platform is operating exactly as intended.
  
  If creating little islands is the intended way of using lemmy then why bother with federation in the first place? Not to mention that carving up the fediverse robs it of the prospect of at some point replacing big players like reddit.
- 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 ~~mods~~ admins to defederate entire communities is stupid. If you want to talk about THAT, fine.
  EDIT: admins, not mods, my mistake, thanks god
- 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.
  
  The problem is that defederation is that it causes damage to the wider network, and can be far too easily abused.
  It makes instance selection very important to the user (which is already a major friction point). And causes terrible UX when users can't figure out why content is unavailable to them.
  It can also be used as a weapon by powerhungry admins to force centralization around their instance.
  I know there aren't really great alternatives to defederation for content moderation right now. But I think that these could easily be implemented. For example, instances could maintain a 'blocklist' which users could automatically be subscribed to upon joining, but they would be able to inspect and 'opt-out' from blocking certain instances or categories if they desired.
  I think this is a good balance of protecting users, and also respecting their freedom.
  Keep in mind that this doesn't mean they could POST rule breaking content. (They are still users of your instance after all). Just that they would have the choice of which content they feel comfortable with VIEWING.
  When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And defederation is a nuclear powered sledgehammer lol.
  
  there is no "lemmy TOS". lemmy is only a piece of software that can be ran on a server. it is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL, a copyleft free software license.
  this means that pretty much the only legal "terms" you need to abide to run the software on a server is that if you modify it in any way, you have to publish the source code so that others can freely read and modify your version, the way you read and modified the original (this is what copyleft means; it's the exact opposite of copyright).
  the instance owner is the only one providing any "service" here, and as such they decide their terms (the site-wide rules for an instance). if you run your own instance on your own server, you are the only one who can dictate any "terms of service".
  all of this is by design; the fediverse would be pretty useless if anyone could impose a global "terms of service" over it.
- Well this is the design problem in ActivityPub. There are Nostr and OcapPub that are promising to resolve this problem.
- 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!
- You know you can block all the way down at the IP level, right?
- I don’t know how any of this works either, but I’m hoping for a solution that makes it harder for owners of large instances throwing their weight around to affect the users so drastically.
  Something I can imagine would be the ability to be logged in to multiple accounts at once, so a user could see and interact with multiple unlinked instances seamlessly. Commenting or posting in a community would default to either an account made in that communities instance, or the next available account in a linked instance.
  I think this is sort of how it works now, we’re just missing the ability to make the experience seamless.
- It's not going to get addressed because it can't be, other than running your own Lemmy instance and just federating with everyone, until the main instances turn off blocklists and instead use allowlists.
- Yep, this exact situation is why this whole federation thing is never ever going to catch on as much as Digg and Reddit did. I’m all for a good Reddit alternative but I really don’t think this will be it.
  
  The history of the fediverse has been paved with comments like this. Many thought lemmy would never be as populated as it is right now.
  Truth is broad unsubstantiated critiques are easy to make. Constructive criticism harder. Actually trying to make things better even harder.
  How much is your critique just “I don’t like a loss of some convenience even if it is the trade off for choice, diversity and non-profit corporatisation of my online social life”?

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.
- People in this thread look like they never mada a mistake doing something for the first time.
  I mean 90% of this community is now Redditors so are you really surprised with the attitude?
  
  Sadly, I am not surprised at all. But I do hope it will be possible to have some instances where diversity is encouraged.
- Sir this is memes
  
  True, I got too serious. Will be more careful in the future.
- Who puts the word "shit" in the name of their website anyway? That's a good way to make sure a lot people don't talk about your site. Kids aren't allowed to say that word, people at work won't say it because it's inappropriate, the media won't say it on air, etc. One could argue it's actually "sh dot it just dot works" but that's a mouthful.
  
  Shhh, it just works 🤫
  
  No swearing on my Christian Minecraft server
  
  I see it as a good thing. I don't really want my server full of kids or talked about in the media, and would likely question the motivations of anyone who did

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)
- Memes improve life 😌
  
  heh, just realised i said "thank god someone is finding humor in this" and you, the someone in question, are literally called "god" :)

I'm out of the loop, what happened?!
- One person created the_donald over there and people are getting butthurt.
  
  are getting butthurt
  Were butthurt, until they got what they wanted and the community got banned
- Yeah I missed the drama too
  
  There's no real drama. Beehaw is defederating from some instances with shitty communities. That's all.
  I don't understand people who want this to be another reddit. Reddit was awful lmao
- Aren't they de-federating (fuck the English language) over the_Donald joining the instance?
  
  It was banned as soon as the admin realized it even existed lmao. There was just one dude posting there and it was terrible quality so no one even cared.
  But everyone made such a fuss that the dude is practically now the entire branch of Nazism of Lemmy or something according to the proponents of defederation.

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.
  
  Thank God
- If I'm actively subscribed do I still get the content [...]?
  No, the whole point of defed is that your home instance stops "listening" to the updates of the defederated instance. So you'd stop getting updates from any community hosted on @sh.itjust.works period.
  
  Not only that. Had lemmy.ml defederated sh.itjust.works, users of lemmy.ml also wouldn't see comments from sh.itjust.works members on any other instance.
- I think beehaw is the only major group that actually defederated us, but that was before the drama
- If this defederation thing takes hold on the Lemmy network like it did the activitypub network then there's no point in switching to this from Reddit, and it'll just become small unconnected forums anyway.
- Now you only see the “local” copy of those subs. People in your instance can post links to it but you won’t see anything other non federated instances.

You take shits how pathetic 🙄
- fr fr fr fr

What happened?
- You will find information in the comment thread. Many explanations of what happened with link sources.
  
  Yup, felt pretty stupid after I found it

Aren't they de-federating (fuck the English language) over the_Donald joining the instance?
Sidebar: saying 'federating' aloud ought to be an auditory war crime. What an ugly fucking word. I would rather hear someone fart into a tuba
- 1 guy made a community. He put some shitty posts there that were massively downvoted. He was banned and his community deleted. It's hardly "The_Donald" joining.
- Jesus, you are all over the place. Hearing someone fart into a tuba would be fucking awesome, and possibly quite sonorous as compared to the usual method of blowing raspberries into a tuba. I can't make heads or tails of you.
  
  all over the place
  Yeah that's me. I like to cover a lot of ground with my mental imagery
  
  https://drums-tuba.bandcamp.com/ is awesome. You could totally work some farts in there. In fact, I would be surprised if he had never done it.

286 comments