cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/114721
My humble takes on the most popular Lemmy instances, or "how to piss off the whole Fediverse with a single meme".
Here are the links to each one of the mentioned instances:
Far Left Centre Left Centre Right Far Right Lemmygrad Exploding Heads Hexbear Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Beehaw Pricefield Lemmy Based Count sh.itjust.works Blåhaj Lemmy Divisions by zero Lemmy NSFW Hack Liberty
To be fair to the large number of blocked instances on the Beehaw blocklist, most of them are from a starter blocklist that's been circulated through the fediverse of "These are skinhead and child sexual abuse material instances. Block them before they even try to federate." I think the only true defederation controversy is with Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works and that was a purely mechanical issue of "too much troll traffic all at once and no tools to surgically handle it rather than just burn down the whole thing"
I’m wondering what “over 400 blocked instances” means in practical terms. Most of us have no idea if 400 is a large or small number in relation to the size of the fediverse. Most of us don’t know how big those blocked instances are, or if they even exist anymore.
Mostly, as you explain, I don’t care about numbers if what they’re blocking is hatred and abuse. Maybe “over 400 blocked instances” is supposed to be a criticism, but to me, it sounds like the people running Beehaw are doing their jobs well.
That's a fair concern. You can check the data for yourself on the awesome-lemmy-instances repository; alternatively I have made this tool to make the search more interactive and user friendly: defed.xyz.
Short answer to your question is: 410 is a lot. They are the second instance for number of defeds, only beaten by feddit.dk. Most big instances tend to have between 30 and 50 blocks, with the notable exception of sh.itjust.works which has only 5.
To give credit where credit is due, few of the instances blocked by beehaw actually run Lemmy and even fewer are active (2 or more monthly active users). This doesn't change the fact that it's a BIG number.
edit: pinging @Cube6392@beehaw.org as this partially answers their question.
We have a large number of blocks too, but that's because we auto sync our blocklist between our instances, so we end up with lots of non Lemmy instances on the list
It's 10 times the number of instances that lemmy.ml blocks, if that helps.
Not really. How many users are on the blocked instances? How many of those instances have tried to federate with Beehaw? How active are the people on the blocked instances? How active are people not on those instances who do interact with them? A raw number of instances isn't that useful to understanding the impact on the network graph
Many are also Mastodon instances, which can be particularly troublesome.
The problem with large blocking lists is that they can't be easily audited. How do you know if there's any legit website amongst 400 links?
I agree. I think relying too heavily on blocklists can be a detriment to the growth and decentralization of the Fediverse. Who even decides what ends up on them? Maybe you pass through the crossair of whoever handles that while they're having a bad day and boom, you're barred out of 2/3 of all the content.
I don't mind big blocklists honestly, the problem with auditing is purely on a UX side - if we would have a way to sort/filter isntances by software and have some kind of grouping ("all of these instances are on a list of badies"), it wouldn't be such a problem.
What's really a problem is whitelisting. It's proactively punishing those who use small/personal instances, and not federating is much easier than defederating, so it'll more probably be abused by admins.
Agreed. Fortunately very few instances rely on that. The only decently big one is hexbear.net, the second biggest both of our instances are barred from has 41 active users and all the others have only a single digit of active users. Not that big of a loss.
Data for your instance: https://defed.xyz/check/eviltoast.org
I can imagine whitelisting to become more popular as Lemmy user base grows and communities become more suitable for lurkers and non-techies who know nothing about federation.
It's such a contrast seeing blank blocklist after using Beehaw and blahaj honestly. Small instances are so much better tbh. And this tool is great, thanks! I hope we'll figure out how to get a list of blocked communities somehow. This lack of transparency is so annoying.
For real. Small instances ftw. Glad you enjoy my tool. Investigating blocked communities might be a feature for a future upgrade, thanks for the idea.
It's also a problem with how much information Lemmy makes available. In most of the fediverse the block list includes a reason field
Yeah, it would also be great if a user could easily sort blocked communities by software, to stop seeing all the mastodon and pleroma instances.
I like the idea of filters and sorting. Also I liked the old layout better where there was a vertical split with federated instances on the left and defederated instances on the right