Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?
This is a bad take because you used the most extreme example of why defederation is a practical necessity to justify a significantly less serious issue. I personally would want the bar to be much higher for this kind of thing.
I also don’t “misunderstand” anything here. I just strongly disagree with the decision. What’s next, beehaw gets upset that other instances allow downvoting?
I do not think that anyone “likes” de-federation. In the end though people coming in from other nodes are guests in our forums. We do not have to put up with bad behavior. Moreover instances that allow their users to engage in this bad behavior take some responsibility too. They are your users after all. So if your instance gets banned look to your instances users, and also the admins and their policies that allow those users on that node. Do not under estimate the troll problem. Moderation is required and if it cannot be done effectively then other actions have to be taken like de-federation.
Then again, your coming from lemmy.ml and are not de-federated so why do you care. It is also a bit rich when lemmy.ml has not accepting subscriptions from behaw since I joined. Maybe you should complain about that too.
Then again, your coming from lemmy.ml and are not de-federated so why do you care.
This is a terrible argument, in any case.
Maybe a better one is that lemmy.ml has not been accepting subscriptions for some time. It also has it’s own block list in terms of federation: https://lemmy.ml/instances too. Most instances will not federate with everyone and will block some to protect their communities. It is just a fact.
As I said, I do not think it is a desirable thing in general and it is disruptive when transitioning to blocked but it is from time to time necessary. The necessity has to be jugged from the point of view of the instance making the decision and their admins. So projecting some other set of concerns onto it is kind of questionable. It is even more questionable when your instance is doing similar things and worse when users from your instance were the ones causing the issue to start with.
People don’t dislike defederation because they misunderstand it. They dislike it because it’s a bad user experience. It sucks to effectively get banned from a bunch of major communities through no fault of your own. It’s a flawed system. I don’t know what a good solution would be, but it’s definitely an issue.
I guess one solution is to encourage users to join servers that are as small as possible, to reduce the chance of getting blocked. But that approach comes with its own set of downsides too.
Brand new to lemmy, but this is my take as well. The first account I created was on lemmy.world and then I had to create another to come here. Imagine if Verizon ‘defederated’ from T-Mobile because of a few bad actors.
The problems are real, but the solutions Lemmy currently seems to offer are going to stifle it’s growth before it can truly go big. I can deal with it, but as it currently stands I could never get my friends to join and even if they did, a defederation event happening would kill the concept dead for my more casual friends.
It’s just like when email blew up. Email is a federated system as well. These are basically the same arguments I was hearing in the late 80s, early 90s about email. It’s too confusing, nobody will ever use it.
Most servers did zero authentication for incoming emails. When spammers suddenly struck huge ip blocks were banned including innocent bystanders. Any “home” machine was often port blocked from running a mail server.
They developed tools and techniques to mitigate problems and now nobody cares where your email is.
The tools for this area known and the devs are working on it. Early adopters experience some friction.
It will take more time to establish norms. Other instances will certainly defederate and folks will become more accustomed to what that defederation means.
Instances are very vulnerable right now. There’s not much ability to trust or predict how the owners of your instance will behave, because there isn’t a long history of past behavior to look back on, so understandably some users will be frustrated by the lack of stability.
I do see one huge issue with how people are being instructed to join lemmy, which is that most resources tell people it doesn’t matter which instance they join. That becomes fundamentally untrue with defederation.
I completely understand the reason for the current workflow. However, IMO that makes Lemmy almost unusable. I already have a programming and a gaming community that I can’t use Jerboa on. That’s pretty bad.
Excuse me, I’ve been using Jerboa. Are you saying Jerboa, the app, is filtering out some servers, in addition to what my home server has blocked? If so where could I get more information on what Jerboa isn’t allowing?
No, jerboa isn’t filtering anything. They mean they don’t have access to some beehaw communities because beehaw isn’t federating with Lemmy.world.
I don’t know why they are saying this though considering they are in the programming.dev instance
