Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.
I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).
We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.
I don’t wanna be on neither side as well. I don’t agree with whatever attrocities one side or another did.
But let’s face it, the US does something, gets news coverage like “meeeh, it’s what they do, what can you do 🤷”, a communist country does the same and it’s “evil tankies! 😠”.
The inequality of how things are viewed is what bothers me. They all did unspeakable things, no doubt there and I don’t deny that they did. But just because someone is far left or far right, doesn’t necessarily make them evil. Not to mention that you can actually learn some really useful things and get some valuable info regarding certain subjects, as well as interpretations regarding certain events. I would rather have the option to view whatever I like with only 1 account, not have to have 3, 4, 5 because this instance or that instance decided to defderate from whatever.
That’s why I say that blocking works. You don’t like something? Block it. Defederation is stupid to say the least.
I mean, the people calling people tankies are usually anarchists. Not really the same people as cable news organizations lol. Most modern anarchists are highly critical of countries generally, and their own country specifically. At least from my experience, alot of mutual aid orgs and other explicitly anarchist movements in the US reject the premise that the land beneath their feet even BELONGS to the US government.
I guess I understand the backlash, but defederation IS blocking, its just community wide blocking. Some people don’t want to have to manage whether they’re exposed to certain content, they’d rather have their community do it for them. At least for me, beehaw has been pretty open about the conditions of why they defederated from certain instances (and why they are organizing development of more granular moderation tools, so they don’t feel like they have to). Maybe you can argue they are motivated by a sinister desire to restrict access, but at least from my perspective that isn’t a convincing argument. Certain communities want certain things, some may want unfettered access to everything the internet has to offer, but honestly? That ain’t me. I have other accounts on other platforms for that. Sometimes I don’t want to hear why the North Korean state is actually just responding to western aggression, or that trans people should die, or whatever else. Sometimes I do, I consume lots of media from people who I fundamentally disagree with, but that shit stresses me out sometimes. Do I think that lemmygrad is even primarily composed of people who think that way? No. But the admins of beehaw have been pretty clear about what they want out of their community, and as of right now, they don’t have the tools to moderate the influx of people coming over from other instances and being trolls, or not behaving according to the standards they have in place.
Just as a last note, though, I think that alot of the discourse about why defederation is bad is kinda philosophically at odds with the goals of the Fediverse to begin with. Remember, defederation is part of the structure of the Fediverse for a reason, and its partly because it gives autonomy to communities to decide what it is they want to do. Centralized platforms where one authority dictates what is and isn’t appropriate have been going through controversies about that for a WHILE now, and the solutions they come up with are often dogshit. The Fediverse makes these sorts of disagreements fundamentally MORE solvable than any preexisting platform, and with outcomes that mean the people affected have alternatives if they disagree with a decision. Honestly, I think this is a holdover from platforms like reddit, where admin decisions affect EVERYBODY and nobody really has a different place to go.
I think that you can think that YOU want to only block people and never defederate and also respect that other folks don’t necessarily want the same thing. That’s your choice. But if you join an instance that doesn’t moderate its users and that instance can post without limitation on instances like beehaw, which do have moderation standards, defederation is like… the only way that we currently have to stop assholes from brigading or being weirdos. Lemmy isn’t a public square, it isn’t the “front page of the internet”. Its like a community hall, or a political rally, or a convention center. Different instances have different standards, and some instances don’t necessarily want to have an open hallway connecting their Pride Parade to a KKK rally. Or, in a more nuanced example, if you’re hanging out with your friends somewhere, maybe you find someplace quiet and out of the way so you can chat privately. I just think giving people and communities more power in how they live their online lives, allowing them to do whatever they want, whenever they want? That’s just objectively BETTER than some corporation forcing you to stay in the same room as everybody else.
I dunno. You can do what you want. But I just really don’t think you need to be getting mad at other people somewhere else doing something you don’t like. Like… too bad lol. It ain’t your business. You can’t do anything about it, and nobody should be able to do anything about it. Embrace the chaos. Find where you want to be.
To be honest, the whole reddit thing didn’t affect me one bit, I never modded anything, never used 3rd party apps, always used the official app. I just thought that, yes, this does seem like a good idea, I don’t do any of those things, but apparently, a lot of people do and they like using those apps/tools, so, yeah, I’ll try this new thing, it’s opens source, it’s federated, no big brother hanging over your sholder… turns out, for my needs, it’s worse than what reddit was. For starters, I don’t need to have 3 main accounts just so that I can see all of the content of all of the communities I’d like to subscribe to. Second, I don’t have to open up new communities and moderate them and upload content, like I had to do now. And last, reddit actually tracks what I do. I know, that sounds bad, but I actually like it. Why? Because it remembers if I was active in a certain sub the last 2, 3, 4 days and the first feeds it gives me is from that sub, which I like, apparently I stayed over there for quite a while the last time I was active, which means I find it’s content interesting. Lemmy doesn’t have that. Call it evil, I call it a feature.
That makes sense. Reddit is a fully featured product. The interesting thing about open source projects for me, is that they’re slower to develop new features in the short term, but as more and more people come around, the breadth and scale of features can outpace commercial products, because anybody can contribute for any reason. To be honest, if you find the current state of things intolerable, maybe just wait a bit? As more people adopt and start contributing, things will get more polished. I’m almost certain the current defederation thing is just growing pains. As more tools get developed for people to customize their experience, as is the trend for open source, things will get better.
Maybe, we’ll see… I’ll stick around, but just to see how things turn out. My prediction is not as positive as yours, but I hope I’m wrong.