this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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Unfortunately blocking an instance only blocks posts on that instance, not users from it, which is the main issue people have with those instances.
Yeah it's a very common misconception, I find it weird that people are still having it though when 0.19 is widely available.
Maybe they're just saying it as a way to be dismissive of the issue, this kind of stuff happens often when people report or call to attention malicious instances or malicious users.
Honestly I think it's just people that haven't thought very deeply about the nature of communities they're supporting.
nor how letting a large, poorly moderated instance run wild can negatively affect discourse on the entire platform. Before Hexbear was defed'd on lemmy.ca, Lemmy was damn near unusable on many threads because of the spam and trolling. Blocking them doesn't stop them from bothering those who haven't and it affects the platform as a whole.
Blocking is not a real solution, it is putting a blanket over the problem and pretending it went away. People who suggest you do that are suggesting you enable bad faith actors by ignoring their behavior, as opposed to reporting it and/or making others aware so they can report it. We all need to work better to make the platform and spaces on it better, if no one works at it, nothing gets better.
Exactly! Letting problematic instances poison the well leads to a net negative to the platform.
My unpopular opinion: Federating with everyone by default is not sustainable.
It's inevitable that the lemmyverse will shatter, and everyone will be better for it.
Instances will develop their own policies around moderation and behaviour, and federate with other instances with compatible policies.
Basically, federation only works if everyone is acting in good faith. It wouldn't take much for a single entity acting in bad faith to fuck the entire fediverse presently.
Presently admits are blacklisting the bad faith instances. That's going to change so admins whitelist compatible instances.
Exactly. Without rules and enforcement, you just get a cesspit. Anarchy just doesn't work.
Perhaps more accurately, anarchy only works if everyone's objectives are similar or at least compatible.
Like it would be nice to live in a town where you don't need to lock your doors, but it only takes one asshole to make that untenable.
It only taking one asshole is why it doesn't work. You just never going to have no assholes. So you need a justice system, and a way of policing the policing of it.
I think thays a good compromise. if you then have an issie with a particular user you can block them individually.
I'm actually mostly fine with blocking instances myself. Users from troll instances rarely annoy me.
I use Connect for Android, and when I block an instance it blocks the users too. Their comments are still here, but sort of spoiler tagged.
Yes but surely you can understand that even votes from these poorly moderated instances are distorting the discourse elsewhere in the lemmyverse.
Just because you can't see it does not mean the problem is solved.
So we wanna defederate to steer votes in a certain way? Worrying so much about votes is such redditor behavior.
I would challenge you to think about how votes can influence the culture of a community.
You're correct in that worrying about how many upvotes you can accumulate is very reddit.
I'm not really talking about karma accumulation, but rather the way votes can influence visibility of comments. When done methodically, this promotes some ideas over others, and presents an illusion that "everyone else thinks so". This is a very, very powerful way to influence a community.
We are hard wired to absorb the opinions of those around us. Sure you can disagree with other group members, but even that is an acknowledgement that the alternative perspective you're disagreeing with is a popular one.
You could absolutely influence people's opinions on lemmy just with a hacked instance that manipulated votes on comments by just a few dozen points.
You make valid points. Apologies for the Reddit accusation.
But the one thing that comes to mind is that this kind of Communist, like in lemmy.ml, is not big enough to cause this sway.
Sure, the instance is massive, but most users don't hold those same beliefs. Most people go to it as the "default" instance. So I really don't think they have the numbers to cause this issue.
Sure. This thread is talking about lemmy.ml, but I'm talking about the current state of the lemmyverse.
I've posted this elsewhere in this thread but my unpopular opinion is that federation by default is not sustainable.
Presently admins federate with everyone and blacklist those which are problematic.
It's inevitable that in the near future someone with a rudimentary understanding of hosting will be able to spin up a dozen instances, each with a few thousand bot accounts, intent on upvoting every "genocide Joe biden" comment.
The fediverse will shatter. Admins will realise they need policies to guide their own moderation, and acknowledge that they can only federate with specific instances with compatible moderation.
So instead of blacklisting bad instances, you need to change to whitelisting good ones.