Hi all, I’m a Lemmy FOSS app contributor that’s made a couple of tools for people starting small instances including Lemmy Community Seeder (LCS) for building content on new server’s All Feeds and Lemmy Post Purger (LPP) for clearing old posts on smaller instances.
Today I’m releasing Lemmy Defederation Sync (LDS). When launching a new Lemmy instance, administrators may not understand the necessity of defederation with problem instances. Using LDS, you can sync your instance’s “blocked instance” list with that of another server(s) whose admins you trust.
I disagree that defederation hurts Lemmy. It doesn’t hurt it anymore than normal moderation hurt Lemmy. Users on defederated instances are more than able to create an account on a non problematic instance and follow the rules there.
Defederation is essentially Lemmy’s version of quarantining subs on Reddit. And nobody except maybe extremists thought quarantine was a bad idea
You forgot people who selfhost single user instances. So they would have to destroy the old instance and create and new one with a new domain, which is a lot of work and resources.
Edit: Please also notice the problem here is not defederation itself, but shared lists of defederation. Because most likely the list is super long and nobody would check if all instances are legitimately blocked.
If the single user on such an instance is so obnoxious as to be defederated from multiple larger instances, making them spend time and money to come back is a good thing.
If he actually is obnoxious, then yes. But what guaranties he is obnoxious? Or that he just statements were just misinterpreted. Happens a lot.
What could a single user instance possibly do to be defederated on a massive scale? And at that point, why not simply join another instance?
that’s exactly where shared blocklist are a problem, if for some reason or another someone’s instance get mistakingly defederated, which is far form unlikely in one the enormous instances that have to manage federation of hundreds of instances, then all of a sudden, that big instance everyone trust get their blocklist copied all over the verse and poor jane is blocked from everything and has no idea why
They could have done nothing, but because someone on a so called trusted source de-federated it because he did not like him, de-federation would accumulate.
Actually beehaw is a nice instance and is blocking lemmy.world, which too is fantastic. Thus sharing beehaw’s de-federation list would cut out lemmy.world from a huge audience. In this particulare case, I wonder what lemmy.world did wrong to be worth de-federating from.
So you see, sharing huge block lists would wrongfully cut out people. Since nobody would investigate the whole list because doing so would take weeks.
Joining another instance is out of the question for many because they are firm belivers of self-hosting and decentralization. Two principles that are pillars of the the fediverse.
This tool isn’t a shared master list like ad blockers use, it’s me spinning up my own instance and deciding I want to match my blocklist to lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or whoever, specifically. And who I sync from is a decision I make about who I trust etc. I can unmake it and switch my sync to another instance the moment I hear about something I disagree with.
This tool is kind of for those single user instances tho and while something like this could hurt Lemmy that’s only the case if it’s used wrong, I doubt big instances will start to share block lists because they have the resources to gather them manually!
I will exagerate and ask you: are you discriminating between bigger and smaller instances? While smaller instances are definitely small, together they are big enough.
The problem is that Reddit has a massive user-base and profits from the FOMO on newcomers while Lemmy is a very small thing most people don’t know about and there are multiple cases of instances defederating others just because they feel like it… like the BS that beehaw.org pulled. Now we’ve lemmy.world and beehaw.org two of the largest instances that don’t talk to each other.
- Lemmy is not a single thing
- No one is being prevented from visiting defederated instances
- No one should be forced to view content they find objectionable
- Neither should they force their views onto others
- Defederation is the equivalent of walking away from someone you don’t want to engage with
- Defederation does not delete content on other instances
- Lemmy is not reddit
- Defederation is not censorship
