I believe lemmy.world and other instances should start defederating lemmy.ml and other “tankie” instances.
Many users have blocked these instances for extreme political content already.
Please suggest any changes.
EDIT: ok ok ok, I understand this is a stupid idea, how about a default ban list banning lemmy.ml
I think what we ultimately need is a healthy and welcoming culture of being nice to each other and engaging with each other with a minimal amount of drama. But that’s difficult to pull off and a long process. We aren’t there yet but we can make an effort.
Question is: how do we get there? Defederation might be part of that. But it’s a bad tool with lots of consequences and side-effects. And ultimately the Fediverse is about connecting people. So disconnecting them will prove to be problematic. However we don’t all agree on that. And it’s a good thing that the Fediverse is a diverse place. You can sign up at beehaw and they have a strict policy and are happy to defederate with a lot of the network. Maybe OP is better aligned with what they do, than be on lemmy.world
As you say, it’s a very blunt tool and likely only able to create more civil interactions by creating a fairly strong echo chamber.
My perspective on “defederation” conversations, hinted at in my comment above, is that it’s a new “tool”, a new phenomenon etc. Nothing like it existed on reddit for example. And so it’s natural that there will be “unwise”, premature and overzealous calls to use it as though it’s the solution to many of our social media problems, when in reality it’s a relatively subtle tool best used in concert with active and relatively sophisticated community building and organising.
Which all makes sense to me. But what’s a little sad I think is that we have here a pretty good compromise between “absolute free speech is bad” and “censorship is bad” for social media, and instead of embracing it as an ideology we’ve gotten some loud voices eager to use it as a territorial weapon for drawing boundaries around spaces for everyone else without, AFAICT, much the same in the way of actually building spaces that suit people’s needs (though that happens too of course).
If one wants or needs a space that is shut off completely from what one would call “extreme” politics, that’s totally fine. Doesn’t mean all of lemmy world and half or more of the communities on lemmy should be cut off in a big “us and them” statement. Instead … you probably need an instance that caters to that world view. You may need to try to start organising it yourself if it doesn’t exist. Except, that’s harder than posting a “lets defederate” post.
I think I mostly agree. The thing with that, we could solve a lot of the issues with technology. Give users more tools to decide what content and which users to expose themselves to. Maybe hide or collapse content on a user level. But we just have these blunt tools and lots of fine granular tools that would be able to actually tackle the issues are missing on Lemmy. And I think we should revamp some other aspects too to foster good behaviour. I don’t see things change substancially, the way it is.
One good thing about the Fediverse is everyone can have their own instance and make their own rules. Theoretically that enables us to have a locked down “safe” space and an anarchic place with freedom of speech next to each other.
In practice most people don’t lean towards the extremes, you’re right. I want something in between. Not just a*holes and trolls but some meaningful discussions. I wouldn’t want to be on a free speech instance. But I also don’t want to be in a bubble all day. So something in the middle would be appreciated.
Tools could always be better for sure! This is still beta software after all! And the fediverse ecosystem is still finding its feet.
That being said … isn’t subscribing to communities a pretty good tool already? I ask because it strikes me that many here might be talking about the “all” feed. If so, that’d be a case of people just not using the tools given to them (and also an abuse of this system frankly).
Think I’m totally with you there. The fediverse for me has been a bit of a let down in terms of how much it has just recreated big social platforms without more experimentation. It’s early days and all so I don’t want to be harsh on all the devs. They’ve done great things. But it does feel like some basic revamping could be quite nice.
I don’t get that either. The “All” feed ist just a random pile of uninteresting stuff (to me). Lots of news of the day, memes that aren’t even funny… I think I would have left Lemmy a long time ago if that had been my experience. I subscribe to the things I want to read. But I took from a few conversations that some people like to browse the “All” feed. I still don’t get it.
I kinda lost hope that Lemmy will provide us with a new and different approach to this. The developers are kind of doing their thing. There have been suggestions and new ideas. But usually they don’t get implemented. Maybe they’re just not that progressive. And a few attempt I read about were really radical in re-defining social media. And people also don’t seem to like anarchy and freedom of speech over everything else because that just ends up being a place for trolls. I’d like to have something in the middle. And I think we’ve already learned a few things in the time Lemmy has been around.
Hi, I am the dev for Quiblr. I built a “For You” feature that tailors your Lemmy feed based on your browsing habits. Also, it runs entirely on your device (100% and no data is ever shared). The “For You” sort can be toggled like any other post filter (e.g. hot, active, etc.)
Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think!
Yea, I was surprised to learn this too. I don’t know the numbers but I’d bet it isn’t insignificant. I learned of the practice from a thread of people recommending to others that they use “All” and block all “the bad instances” to “clean it up” … and I was just kinda shocked at how much of an indifference to the design of the system and all of the community management and moderation all of the mods do not to mention an abuse of the federation mechanics to just block whole instances on a whim.
If it’s not too much to ask … do you have any descriptions or links or clues to see more of this?
Generally, there are quite a few people who feel this way about the fediverse as a whole. The sorts of people who are open to seeing all of this as an opportunity to make some progress on what “big social” did (perhaps like you and I). I’ve connected with a few in my time here (mostly over on mastodon) and the general feeling I’ve picked on is that all of this (incl the protocol itself) so far is a good “first step” or “prototype”, but that moving on to the next step and taking stock of what lessons have been learned could happen soon-ish.
I don’t have any good links. There has been an AMA with the developers earlier this year (on lemmy.ml) and I asked some questions regarding the development process and the direction of the project (and finances). I don’t have the link available, since I switched instances in the meantime.
And I followed the Github issues for some time. Usually you get an idea about how developers handle things by looking at their interaction with the community. There are some requests from last summer which I think would be worth looking into, but the devs say they don’t have the manpower. Same applies to several UI bugs. They’re still pretty much untouched as development focuses on the backend. And I’ve heard from people that the maintainers aren’t always happy with contributions. Which I think isn’t great because if you have an open source project along with a community, and then people try to engage but get disappointed because their day worth of coding is wasted and the PR denied… That isn’t going to foster a healthy community. I’m not sure if they’re working towards a different vision of the project, or manpower is that scarce. I mean they have 2 or 3 people working fulltime on Lemmy and they get paid a salary. I think we discussed that in the AMA. They definitely don’t get rich and pay isn’t what a big company would pay.
And there was something with the instance admins that needs improvement. I’m not sure what that was. Either image moderation or resource usage. (Or both.) Because admins need to abide by the law and pay attention to what’s uploaded (ideally without messing with the database manually) and I think they did some database performance improvements in the last few releases. I’m not sure. Rust should be fairly efficient. With databases you need to pay attention to what you’re doing. But I don’t know all the used frameworks. I’m just speculating here.
So… I really don’t have a link. I just occasionally read what people post here and want. And I sometimes follow the development.
And the fediverse as a whole… I don’t think ActivityPub is very efficient. The polling and simple design is compelling, but it’s not very performant. And it has some issues with caching etc. Also people want extensions and functionality that is well-defined and interoperable. But AP is just a well-defined core. And I think not even voting is part of that standard and just something people kind of agreed on. Which is problematic. Lots of normal stuff in Mastodon, Lemmy, etc isn’t really part of the standard. And I’m not sure if they release a new revision at some point. I think the current revision is a bit older as of now. I think we need that because the whole Fediverse is about interoperability.
Yea, generally fediverse projects have moved slowly. Mastodon has basically the same problems AFAICT despite being bigger and wealthier.
In a way I’ve been wondering if the fediverse is a kind of trial run for modern open source culture and what it can do other than packages for specific languages without the sponsorship of big corps. So far, it’s been really cool and super easy to take for granted. But also revealing I think in how hard it is to get things going when people need to make a living and everyone expects the internet to be free.
The performance implications of the protocol have been an elephant in the room for sure. I’ve never seen anyone do any sort of analysis.
And its quality as a foundation for a federated ecosystem seem definitely questionable. Especially as its main champion, Evan, seems super defensive about it and the idea of upgrading it. Sadly, it seems they’re an older tech person and see the protocol as their life’s work. So any proposal for starting again just runs into resistance. That there’s a weird cult around the protocol doesn’t help either.
As for the lemmy devs being antagonistic to contributions. I’ve heard that too but am suspicious. I’ve certainly seen 3rd party contributions go through. The whole image deletion episode was bad though. They even admitted to it to some extent.
I used to think they were way too “cranky” … but I’ve actually come around to the idea they push about not being too demanding of open source devs. It’s a serious issue with burnout being real and sustainability being vital for the fediverse. I was an early firefish user and saw that whole team, instance and project implode from the inside.
Would the devs be better at community management with proper salaries and community support and donations? Prob not! But some form of community manager could probably go far (even now if anyone is up for it) which seems viable if the support base got bigger.
I’m personally hoping to try to contribute by sometime this year, so I guess I’ll see how it goes and let you know if you like!
With the other group based platforms coming along (piefed and nodebb and maybe sub links) I’m hoping it becomes a richer part of the fediverse.
Thanks for the comprehensive comments. I didn’t even know the whole backstory behind ActivityPub. I always just took it for granted. I think we agree that there are quite some issues that are technical in nature. I think we’d need so solve a few of those before we can think about growing the Fediverse substantially. It’s certainly not easy. But adding drama also doesn’t help. I’m quite pisitive about the Fediverse. At least in the mid to long term. Maybe a bit competition and new projects will help add a few new ideas.
I guess most want to discover new communities.
Maybe something like https://quiblr.com/ ?
Honestly I’m in favor of people talking even when it isn’t nice. I’d rather have angry words than no words, you know?
Agree to disagree. If the internet was an empty space with only a few posts, I’d understand. But it’s filled with lots of stuff. And every shitty interaction I have, actively takes away time from my day. Time I could spend reading something nice and positive, actually interacting with people, learning something or doing something productive like maintaining my server or coding. I think it’s a waste. And worse than that, it also affects your mood and drives you further apart. And it’s not healthy. Every interaction defines the atmosphere of this place. Good and bad ones. The whole atmosphere becomes toxic if a certain amount of interaction is bad and people always have to expect that happening. I’ll certainly stop giving (good) advice if there is a 40% chance that I get yelled at. And I think we have to guide and steer to the correct destination and do that early. And there is precedent. We have had several attempts at re-defining social media. Once trolls and negativity dominate, the places usually die over the course of a few months or years.