The only threat to this burgeoning community is the same old divide & collapse nonsense that separates citizens under their overlords everywhere.
I would create accounts and start calling to defederate instances which allow non-polite (or politically incorrect or otherwise offensive) communities.
We didn’t just survive the trolls on reddit. We thrived amongst them. We can handle them. We can block them.
I want curatorial tools to curate my own feed. I absolutely 100% do NOT want any admins telling me what I can’t read. And going to another instance is no solution if that instance is blocked.
I don’t want to be on a purely polite ecosystem, or a purely right-wing-idiot ecosystem. I want access to everybody, and the tools to curate that experience.
The trolls do NOT have the power to take us down. But the admins definitely do.
Welcome to the Defediverse.
I’m pretty sure this is what caused beehaw to defederate lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Several pro-reddit people posted to reddit (on a sub that is now private) about doing just that. It worked and took 48 hours or less for beehaw to defederate them. But there was a lot of discussion about the situation across several servers and it doesnt really seem to have worked to fracture the community other than isolating beehaw which already wanted to be fairly isolated to begin with.
Do you have a recommend server? I just joined the latter one, does that mean I won’t be able to participate in certain communities?
The first thing I saw on this site was “you’re a N*”** F***" which isn’t a great sign…
I tried signing up to multiple different instances I guess? The first few were full. I’m new here and just want to make sure I’m at the right place, not loving that the first thing I see is pretty racist and homophobic
Try joining smaller instances. It’s nice if they are run by people with good reputation in the libre world. I’m in lemmy.sdf.org and it’s pretty good.
If you don’t want to see any kind of offensive content, I recommend signing up to Beehaw. It’s a self proclaimed “safe space”. This means that they actively delete offensive content, they do not allow nsfw, and they defederate from any instance they see as a danger to this safe space.
You can also browse instances from join-lemmy.org and look at their blocked instances. If you see instances that block many or some major instances that are right wing or promote things you don’t like, you’ll know you found the right place that will disallow offensiveness in your feed. :)
Instead of defederating whole servers, I would like admins to have an “opt out” or “un-default” button, then each user can browse the list of servers that have been opted out and individually opt in again instead of having to move their username to a different server.
I would grudgingly accept having the ability to op-in to “problematic” instances or communities. As long as I’m not denied any functionality. It’s an acceptable compromise.
instead of having to move their username to a different server.
IMO this is a separate problem; I’d like the ability to move my account between servers and preserve my comment history and subscriptions.
The comment history migration will not happen. It’s not feasible with the way fedi software works. Subscription migration tools exist but are limited, and I am sure they will grow more prolific in the future, because the tools for it are getting better.
It’s not feasible with the way fedi software works.
I admit it’s more complicated than it first seems, and I’m not deeply familiar with the ActivityPub protocol, but could you elaborate on why it wouldn’t be feasible to extend AP to support user account migration?
We did not thrive amongst trolls on Reddit. Reddit banned and contained certain subreddits. It works. It made the platform a better place for everyone else. Defederation accomplishes the same thing
defedrate until mods catch up with the task of cleaning rancid human waste, then refederate again, no problem. things shouldn’t be rushed. take the ukraine war for exemple, the enemy is slowly but surely weakend to its death. also if an instance gets to be defederated, their user base have to be aware that there are trolls among them, and that they need to learn manners and behave, while instance admin/mods have to block sign ups and ban the culprit usernames. once the sanitation work is complete, they could reach out to the instance that got defederated from them so they could refederate, and from then on its a matter of credibility and trust. if an instance admin isnt serious about cleaning his intance he could stay locked out to oblivion and the unfortunate users could blame their instance admin for its demise and not making their time spent there worthwile… and from then on it is just survival of the fittest: whoever get to maintain his instance will rack up a healthy userbase.
Defederating instances doesn’t just block a hateful subreddit. It blocks all the communities and members.
Also, we totally 100% thrived among them before they were banned.
Also, they didn’t always ban them. They sometimes just blocked them from /r/all but we could still go read them and interact.
Defederation is unhealthy and gross.
Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but this whole thing is starting to sound like “don’t interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Was it rigged from the start? For a couple of days everyone was civil and in less than a week, “Let’s Get Ready toooo RUMBLE”!
Was there another way?
a decentralized platform (aka fediverse) is already divided, that’s just the nature of how it’s set up.
the real issue is that, by trying to create “safe” spaces (as beehaw did), defederating all instances that challenge that mindset just creates insular and rather meaningless echo chambers.
ultimately, this platform will devolve into close minded communities
