Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?
Why do you think entire instances will be devoted to that? You will have to block every instance that has open registration, since any open instance cannot guarantee one of the people you mentioned will not come in. I guess the issue I have is that I see moderation as something between users and communities. Not that the overall instance should be doing the moderation.
Because entire instances have already devolved to that and thus been blocked by the wider fediverse.
On some level I think you’re both right - this is roughly the problem that happened with email and spam.
At one point it was trivial to run your own Mailserver, this got harder and harder as issues with spam got worse. Places started black holing servers they didn’t know and trust, this drove ever more centralization and a need for server level monitoring/moderation because a few bad actors could get a whole server blocked.
We can know that bad actors will exist, both at the user and at the server level. We can also know that this has a history of driving centralization. All of this should be kept in mind as the community discusses and designs moderation tools.
Ideally, I hope we can settle on systems and norms that allow small leaf nodes to exist and interconnect while also keeping out bad actors.
yeah this is like everything on our defederation list besides lemmygrad, shitjustworks, and lemmyworld–we’re literally using a block list which is dedicated to those kinds of instances
Is there a central place to track these instances?. Or do you all have a text list or the reasons you defederated some that you may be open to sharing (even privately). I was looking for something specifically to avoid things like illegal content and the like.
Some are run or overrun by those kind of people. Have a look at how many instances are already defederated: https://beehaw.org/instances
We sure, I can understand Defederation from “skinheads.social”. I’m more concerned with large instances like lemmy.world who just are rather wide-open. I wonder if large open instances are just bad.
The Admins here have been pretty open about the fact that they’re keen on re-federating with large instances once better moderation tools are available!
