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
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I agree with the hex bear removal. The people and subs are just poison.
You are free to block communities or even whole instances if you want.
I don’t particularly care for the anti-western hegemony, anti-capitalist, attitudes from a minority of users there that can’t help themselves but make every post political but i still enjoy the content from the rest.
The health of the network depends on being able to have a lot of different viewpoints and servers federated which each other. It’s better for users to block content and users that are bothersome to them than admins to defederate for political reasons (harassment, legal and liability issues of course are reasonable still)
I agree here. I would like the power to be with the individual. let us block at all levels, by keyword, etc. Let me subscribe to anything as well including other folks block lists.
Just block the users you don’t like, sheesh. For instance I usually just block any .world users who make threads crying about “tankies”.
If users can individually block these instances, what is the benefit of defense rating from them?
- It reduces the barrier of entry for new users to get an account going that is not flooded by political extremist views in it’s feed.
- It causes anonymous users to not see they shitshow. And since most users start out by browsing anonymously while deciding whether they want an account or not, that is a big deal.
- It gives the impression that this community is at least somewhat ok with the views that these extremists hold.
It should be opt-in to view posts and comments from these sources.
Degenerating. Defenestrating. DEFEDERATING!
@#%! autocorrect
Can you add the word to your device’s dictionary, for future use?
I tried but there’s no option for it in the app I’m using, Voyager. A long press on the word yields options like “copy”, “look up”, but nothing about the dictionary.
I’ll share this with the lemmy.world admins, but I believe hexbear at a minimum is already defederated. .ml is not. Not sure on lemmygrad.
Hex bear and Leningrad are both defederated. Just lemmy.ml isn’t which I have blocked. Mostly because it’s annoying ending up on one of their communities and then having them get all upset when you point out basic facts.
Please share with the lemmy.world admins that i don’t want to be defederated with lemmy.ml then too. OP should really ask their own instance admin though, what the hell.
General consensus seems to be that, yes, .ml is problematic, but also it’s not going anywhere due to being the OG lemmy. Too many vital communities are there.
“This instance is spewing harmful propaganda, but it’s ok because a bunch of people talk about Steam there.”
I’ve been in support of defederating from .ml for months. Their shit is spilling into all the other instances.
Hexbears stay winning as always
If racing to the bottom was a competition, you’d still be second behind Yugthos and their army of Canadian-based hot-takes. The only thing you’re winning is second place, always.
Literally who?
You can cross off lemmygrad and hexbear. Those are defederated already.
It’s just lemmy.ml we have to talk about.
Why is this Mastadon instance blocked?
https://social.mechanizedarmadillo.com/
Seems like a random account with nothing controversial.
I think you’re looking at the wrong list. That page contains both the allowed and the blocked instances. The one you mentioned is allowed.
The existence of a list of linked, and a list of blocked, implies three, possibly four independent states of “instance relationship”.
Can someone who understands it deeply please explain to me? What is the relationship between a “linked” instance and a “blocked” instance, and how does that relate to “defederated”?
Does federation require active configuration from one instance to another? Or is federated the default relationship when no config data exists?
Instance Target gets linked when someone from instance Source subscribes to a community of Target
Defederating = blocking in this context, defederated instances show up in the blocked instance list
That’s good, although I do want to crosspost to other instances like .zip
I’ll add to hendrik’s sibling post … it seems you’re relatively new to the fediverse. You may want to get a feel for the place before advocating for such wide reaching actions.
I’m all for expressing your feelings on an issue, but I do wonder if your eagerness is a bit premature. I myself “called for” defederation early in my time on the fediverse … and it was dumb of me.
Since then I’ve come to view most arguments around the idea of defederation suspiciously. There’s usually a bit of personal drama or a shallow opinion or people who want to loudly voice opinions without wanting to put work into making this place better. Usually, if defederation is actually needed, the admins will know before you do and it will be obvious.
All that being said … I’d ask you … what do you think federation and decentralisation is for?
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
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.
Defederation might be part of that
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I’m pretty much a natural enemy of tankies, but I love being able to talk to them.
I too view defederation with suspicion.
If .zip is your home instance, why do you care about with whom .world federates?
because people by nature want to amplify their opinion
Good point
Because .zip may not have a community such as this and they searched fediverse and told was the result.
Lemmy.ml federates with hexbear and grad. As a world user I don’t see hexbear and grad because world blocks them thankfully. Unless you are on server X what server X blocks in no way impacts what you see. So they need to petition their local admin.
That said. I think the only reason world still federates with lemmy.ml. is that so many open source projects communities are still there. They need to get moved off to proper instances like KDE or Mozilla have done. Or we need to start a dedicated instance for it.
They need to get moved off to proper instances
I mean … why? That’s a lot of work and carving up the network … for what?
How about moving communities off of lemmy world onto proper decentralised instances? Cuz it’s a real problem that world people are happy to defederate and cut plenty of users off from their communities. That maybe they don’t appreciate the value of decentralisation and slowly pushing a federated system into merely a monolithic Reddit alternative. That maybe they’re too happy to shape the network into a reflection of their mainstream politics however much it unconvinced others across the network (which is perhaps a very spec thing to do?)
Which, BTW, lemmy ml has never done … they federate widely, have never called for defederstion from lemmy world (interesting that world would defederate first!) and never wanted to be the biggest instance despite they easily could have been.
Seems like maybe some basic moderation at the community level is all you’d need. Maybe some better tools could help … in which case spell out what that’d look like.
Moving whole communities because you don’t like some people … is a lot … and quite rich for someone on world. Maybe those communities are happy where they are (as I’m sure those on world are) and building and organising a better more flexible network is the answer rather than all of us trying to push it into the shape we want.
100 percent this.
How about moving communities off of lemmy world onto proper decentralised instances?
Indeed
Not sure I’m following you, should they not then advocate for Lemmy.zip to defederate? That would be more effective for them
I missed at the start of their post saying it was specifically about .world. Because of that my entire post is meaningless.
No worries!
I doubt you’ll find many instance admins who aren’t already aware of this. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be vocal about what you think should be fixed.
But maybe you should have a quick look at the instance list before posting. As I said 2/3 or your proposal are already done on lots of instances. And lemmy.ml is just difficult. There are still a lot of big/important communities there (and users) which we haven’t yet replaced.
Fucking hell there’s a lot of pedophile instances.
I dig through a bunch and have no idea what you’re talking about… I didn’t see anything.
I’ve had a look at it and it’s not as bad as it looks. Lot’s of websites on that list aren’t around anymore. Others are anime or hentai stuff which might be questionable at times. So from reading the list I thought the fediverse is full of nazis, extremists, trolls and loli pictures. But when doing the research it’s just a minority. Those pedos exist, though. But the blocking works.
Yep. The system is, pleasantly, working as designed, and it seems to be working well.
It’s called a federation. Its design is intended to give people options. To provide a diverse network of content that people can navigate as they see fit.
The internet can naturally do a bad job of facilitating good and robust conversations.
Federation is the only cure I’ve seen for social media … where separate but connected and navigable spaces can co-exist, enabling a discourse through contrasting biases and perspectives, for those willing to use the content that way.
Can’t stand a community or instance? Don’t subscribe. Or unsubscribe or block.
Instance defederation is an extreme action and requires extreme justification IMO. It reduces the size of the network and the value of the ecosystem. Especially for lemmy world’s size … it has a responsibility to support the network.
What some loud people find unacceptable is likely interesting to some quiet others.
Differing political “sides” or perspectives isn’t enough. Politics isn’t everything for everyone. Moreover, it’s exactly the domain in which a diverse array of content is most valuable and important … because no one has all the answers!
Tankies are fascists. Fascists shouldn’t be tolerated.
Tankies are fascists.
From what I’ve seen around here, this just isn’t true and seems more like anything “extreme” and not somewhere closer to the middle is bad.
Authoritarians are authoritarian first. Everything else is a very distant second. I really hate when people call Marxist leninists/tankies fascist. They do a lot of the same things but there are distinct differences which makes one different from the other.
I think with the heavy resurgence of fascist politics around the globe right now. A lot of people sort of just learned the term Fascism and just randomly apply it to things it shouldn’t be. The truth is Marxist leninists are to tankies what Liberals are to fascism. And the funny thing is both groups will usually download that heavily LOL. Despite it being a basic fact of their general authoritarian Behavior.
Can’t stand a community or instance? Don’t subscribe. Or unsubscribe or block.
I agree that defederations should not be done lightly, but I just want to point out that “just block” is not a foolproof strategy. An instance block on Lemmy functions like blocking all communities, so you will still see comments from that instance on other posts. Also, the blocked instance will still influence your feed via their votes.
it has a responsibility to support the network
Well, on the other hand it also has a responsibility to provide a reasonably well-moderated space that doesn’t include bigots or what’s worse.
To be clear, I am not advocating for or against defederation of lemmy.ml, just want to add some nuance to this.
just want to add some nuance to this.
All good and cheers!
just this is needed
Good luck defederating from lemmy.ml and losing, among others
There are alternatives that we’ve been trying to push (see the few posts on !fedigrow@lemm.ee ):
But network effect is still around.
Blocking seems enough for most people.
It’s not that it’s big, rather then we are still tiny, and some of the less tiny communities are there.
But at the end of the day, you do you
I’ve gone without those for almost a year now. I’m doing aight.
That’s definitely an option. Other people might prefer to keep access to them.
Blocking at the personal level allows people to choose
It also allows comments and votes from the blocked instance to still get through though. You don’t necessarily want that.
Indeed, but there are also people on Lemmy.ml who I appreciate.
@TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml for instance, and there are a few others. I mean, the Lemmy devs are on that instance, don’t we want to be able to talk to them, even if we can disagree with them?
Oh yes yes - sorry, I am not advocating for or against defederating lemmy.ml. I was just saying if you find another instance bad or annoying, you might not still want to see their comments and votes, and in this case a defederation would be better than a user-level block.
Just link to support websites to do with solvent abuse (paint/glue huffing) whenever you see a hexbear / lemmygrad post. Push the narrative that they all huff paint and eventually they’ll isolate themselves.
Why not just call out their tankie bullshit? It’s fun, entertaining, and rewarding.
Is this defederation bullshit going to be the next post that every newbie makes? You can do it yourself – don’t tell me what to do.
I got a two week instance ban on .ml for calling out their tankie bullshit. No respectable instance should federate with them unless they replace their admins, at the very least.
even easier is posting this
Because they just ban you and delete the post. There is no way to call them out if you’re unable to respond to their tankie bullshit.
I don’t post on the tankie instances. I just call them out in the comments.
So far they haven’t banned me. So far as I know I’m only banned from one community, which is something about climate change.
The tankies, to their miserable credit, seem ready for a fight. I respect that.
You’re lucky then, cause every time I’ve said something its ban and post removal. same thing when i see someone else comment.
1000% agree that is exactly what happens. These hexbear snowflakes are terrible.
Then don’t participate in communities on those instances?
Yea I don’t, but just like nazis I’d rather not have them allowed a voice here on lemmy. It’s poison.
Learn to shut up and move on? Your opinion isn’t always necessary?
Don’t waste time arguing with tankies
The fuck? I was answering why it’s better to remove .ml than to argue with them. Just like Nazis, communist authoritarian shits should be stamped out. Both ideologies are posion to humans.
Your opinion wasn’t needed here either but you gave it champ.
Sometimes you can stomp the ideology out of a person without having to stomp the person.
So you’re willing to work with Nazis to change their mind then?
You find me a Nazi and I’ll give it a shot. My hunch is you haven’t been within a hundred miles of a Nazi in your life.
Lol I live in the south and part of my family is from eastern Europe…you have no clue who I am.
You can block Lemmy instances in your settings. You have the tools to solve the problem, use them.
It doesn’t stop you from seeing comments from people on that instance, even if you block the instance.
Just block them.
Ah yes, simply block every user from .ml (one of the biggest instances after LW). Even if it was that easy, it doesn’t stop them from influencing the discussions happening in your instance’s communities and the culture of your instance.
Ah yes, simply block every user from .ml it doesn’t stop them from influencing the discussions happening in your instance’s communities and the culture of your instance.
I feel like this is problematic … every user? That’s necessary or warranted?? That there are so many of them and that it’s hard to do undercuts the idea that it would be warranted. It’s just way too likely that there’s a diversity of users which makes this unwarranted. Which is exactly why defederation can be abused, especially when it’s done by large instances.
Part of the idea of the fediverse is community building and grassroots social media infrastructure. If there truly are problematic users, that’s what moderation and reporting is for. If you aren’t happy with your instance’s or community’s moderation, then you likely either need to help or move.
Otherwise, encountering people you don’t like … feels to me like it’s part of social media (to an extent of course). It’s not like you could block all the subscribers of a sub-reddit over on reddit(am I wrong on that?), and I fear defederation is too often weaponised by the overzealous. Blocking all users of an instance over “they’re influencing the culture” just smells off to me.
