this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
170 points (66.1% liked)
Lemmy.World Announcements
29048 readers
4 users here now
This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.
Follow us for server news π
Outages π₯
https://status.lemmy.world
For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.
Support e-mail
Any support requests are best sent to info@lemmy.world e-mail.
Report contact
- DM https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
- Email report@lemmy.world (PGP Supported)
Donations π
If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.
If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us
Join the team
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
2 weeks ago: Lemmy is so amazing, create an account anywhere and you can access everything! It's like forums but better!
Now: defederate >:(
Ugh. I get the concern in scenarios like this, but in the last couple of days every instance has calls to defederate from this or that. Eventually it's just gonna be small islands of "very compatible" instances.
Well, guess it's back to making separate accounts for everything!
That's a bit dramatic. Most of the big instances will stay federated with most of the others.
Some topics that are just too intolerable to the general population will get isolated. Pedo content, Nazis, etc. if you feel you need to make a second account to go participate in those things, well you do you I guess...
Well, Beehaw already defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, a few fairly normal instances don't federate with lemmy.ml, even more don't federate with lemmigrad, calls to defed from lemmynsfw were there from its very first day, never mind burggit.
Like, okay I get it that it's not a drop-in Reddit replacement and instance owners can do whatever they like - but I still wonder where it leads at the end.
Well lemmy.ml is run by pretty much the same people as lemmygrad. Before the Reddit drama .ml was filled with mostly the same kind of politics. They chose the .ml extension to signify Marxism-Leninism I believe. So it's not that surprising that some have blocked them.
But anyway, where does it lead? We're just in flux. Everyone is figuring everything out. Instances will stabilize. Norms will be established. Everything will be fine. Some pockets will get isolated, but I believe the vast majority will stay together. Once in a while there will be some drama, some splits and spats. It'll be fine, people will shift. Balance will return.
Well, maybe. I'm just skeptical and feel that people have more of a tendency to isolate their islands rather than connect.
And once the disconnect happens, it's difficult to reverse.
Maybe I'm wrong. Guess we'll see.
On the other hand, there's the advantage that if one finds "their own" instance, they are free to speak out their mind, while in the big melting pot there's always a risk of offending somebody by just being a little edgy. Whether that's actually a good thing...
In time, things settle. Those that defederate too much will soon become self-isolated and that's totally fine. Most of the servers will remain federated and will be the body that everyone wants to connect with and others may be very happy to self-isolate and not caring about any other servers or their communities.
What I do find possible is that the owners of federated servers will start to form a governing "council" that share some agreed principles for content and the allied servers would all defederate from any server that violates their shared content rules. To join the main group, you have to agree to abide by the council rules or be defederated as well (for example a server asks to join the main group, then also feds with a piracy server on the group ban list, so it gets defederated by the group).
I feel like NSFW stuff will be fine here, but the questionable, non-consensual stuff will not even be visible by the main group. The federated servers will be the content core, the unfederated servers will be like the wild west, full of questionable and potentially dangerous stuff.
Just give it some time, this is sudden and unexpected growth. It's healthy. I think people are starting to see just how corporate social media is, and how much they are both the content generators as well as the content consumers. So steps to take back the control of how we communicate is a win for us.
Defederation leads to echo chambers. I've certainly had enough of that in Reddit!
With the idea of self-hosted decentralized servers also comes a responsibility. With sites like reddit, the corporation behind it is responsible for everything, including moderating potentially illegal content. With lemmy, this is on the individual servers to handle.
I think it's a bit silly to get all dramatic and say stuff like "Well, guess itβs back to making separate accounts for everything!" just because instances allowing potentially illegal cp are to be de-federated..
I'd say the kbin integration was a pretty big win? And there are tons of new servers coming up - I wouldn't worry about losing a few. There are other nsfw communities as well.
De-federating from someone is totally fine, and that should be up to instance owners (ideally with some input from users)
Exactly, defederation is just a tool and itβs up to the owners to use it when appropriate and in line with their goals for the instance.
For example when brigading happened on Reddit some subreddits had to go private to defend themselves, with Lemmy the owners can defederate from the offending instance instead but still keep access open for everyone else. Another aspect is the legal side, as someone else also mentioned the content OP talks about is illegal in many countries and due to the way the Fediverse works owners of the federated instances will end up linking and hosting that illegal content on their own servers as well, unless they defederate.