It’s one of the main differentiators between instances. If you want no filters, you can make your own instance or see if you can find one with a “zero defederation” policy.
E.g. if you don’t want to see a bunch of political propaganda or CSAM, and are into programming, programming.dev comes “pre configured” for that. Likewise lemmy.world, blahaj, etc… comes with their own flavour and configuration.
Just give me the tools, as a user, to block instances. Not just the way it is done recently but truly block an instance and all it’s posts and users. I want to be able to black hole an entire instance and all things related to it.
I want to block Threads in this way. Nuclear option, I want nothing to do with it.
Yes. Instance and user defederation are best when used together.
Instance owners are responsible for the content that is mirrored on their instance through federation, so they definitely should.
Responsible in what way?
Legally responsible, for one.
I.E. If a federated instance hosted pedophilia, that content would be copied to, and served by, your instance’s infrastructure, which is obviously legally problematic.
Ayy, hello there Kayn (Im just a random guy from filen discord).
Oh hi! Small world, eh?
Yes.
What you’re describing is basically the way Twitter works, and there’s a reason vulnerable folk have migrated away from it in large numbers
Twitter is not federated…
Yes, and thus you have one giant mega community in which every bigot can access anyone and everyone else. Which is what a Fediverse without instance blocks would be like
The OP is not against instance blocks.
Their question was literally “do we still need instance blocks”
What? The question was literally “Should instances defederate with other instances anymore if we can filter instances out on our end?”.
Defederating = instance block
Defederation is done by the instance administrator and affects all users. Instance blocking is done by the user and affects only them.
This is the best part about Lemmy: if you disagree with the way an instance is run, you can setup your own and do what you want to do.
Personally I leave it up to people to block instances. The only instances I’ve had to block are the ones that post illegal content like CSAM.
And users don’t even necessarily need to set up their own instance. There will be defed-heavy and defed-light instances users can just choose from based on personal preference. The instance mostly just matters for who federates and internal moderation policy (which is aligned), so it’s not like anyone will be forced one way or another.
Just run your own server! It’s so easy! And if you’re too poor to afford your own server, just get money!
I’m sorry. Does actually having to put a bit of skin in the game offend you? You’d rather the people spending the actual money and doing the actual work just bow to your whims?
Compassionate fucking BUDDHA are the anti-defederation crowd a bunch of entitled, whiny asses!
I thought the entire point of federated networks is that they give power to users, not to random rich people. If you want someone with a lot of money to decide what content you can see, you can go back to Twitter and Reddit.
The users of Lemmy (the software) are the instance administrators.
Ah, so it’s exactly like commercial networks then, where the true users are not those who create content, but those who want to police what other people can talk about.
Which part of “set up and run your own instance” is unclear you whiny buffoon!?
The part where you need to be rich enough to run a server.
Yes, this is still necessary.
It wouldn’t make sense to put the onus to block every bad instance onto every single user.
Consider the extreme use case, which is obviously CSAM. I rely on my instance admins to handle that for me. If I had to painstakingly block every instance that has poor moderation (or worse), I’d simply stop using Lemmy. The “all” feed would be utterly unusable.
Also, admins need control over what’s in their own database, potentially for legal reasons.
Yes.
Hell yes
I think still yes, when a problem is abundantly clear, but borderline cases can more easily be left to individual preference.
The way federation works is that everything is replicated across all federated servers. If an admin team does not want to have to moderate specific kinds of content or users who are deemed detrimental (but not necessarily illegal) they have the ability and right to defederate.
Also, I’ve blocked servers but it doesn’t block users. Defederation does though.
Yes. I think it’s especially important for attracting (or perhaps more accurately, maintaining) new users to the fediverse.
Defederation should always be an extreme measure. Usually it’s just the self-righteousness instinct trying to performatively obstruct other people. I usually find these discussions repulsive because of how people speak about each other (bitching about “tankies” or whatever and demanding that they be ideologically cleansed).
If we have more power to curate our own feeds, then there should be less defederation.
Usually it’s just the self-righteousness instinct…
I love¹ telepathic people who can read other people’s minds and post on their behalf.
¹ This is sarcasm. I hate the delusional who think they’re telepaths.
Enjoy your feelings of hatred then, I guess. Don’t worry though, defederation will win and you’ll be safe inside your silo bitching about how there were once people who said things you disagreed with whom you hated and continue to hate, and that hate is all you ever communicate.
I’ll probably get downvoted for saying this, but in general I think defederation is against the free software ethos.
Free software is supposed to be about giving control back to the user, not the BOFH that happens to run the server they are using.
There’s obviously going to be exceptions for illegal content, or actively trying to disrupt the lemmy network (by DDOS, flooding, etc) but I feel that’s where the line should be drawn.
Like with many free software projects: you’re free to run a server that complies with your preferences, and let others join along.
FOSS empowers users. That can be to reach each other, or not to. It’s the users’ choice, in this case the instance admin’s, on how to apply those freedoms.
In practice, running anything but a tiny server for friends requires moderators, and moderators don’t like having to make tough decisions. You can join the small subgroup of servers that will only take the bare minimum of moderation actions, but you’re likely to end up getting defederated from large servers for offloading your users’ moderation to them (plus the “anything that’s not illegal goes” servers usually end up attracting douche bags that got banned everywhere else for being unlikable people).
There’s a difference between defederation policy and ban policy. You could have a server that is very slow to defederate, only defederating for abuse and illegal content that can’t be stopped through moderation, while implementing a standard or even fairly aggressive enforcement policy for individuals, both local users as well as remote users. The idea is that you ban offending users, while only defederating when the instance itself is the problem.
Defederation splits the network apart. Trying to make defederation a last resort doesn’t necessarily mean one is a freeze peach instance. Defederation policy is an entirely different beast from moderation.
That said, my understanding is that Lemmy’s moderation tools are pretty lackluster at the moment, and so a big part of the reason that some instances are quick to defederate is that it’s difficult to moderate between poor mod tools and small volunteer mod teams. It’s easier to just defederate.
I agree though that the freedom of FOSS moreso lies with admins, as they’re the ones deploying the software so they can choose how to run their instance, whether that means federating with everyone or just running a completely defederated Lemmy instance with no peer instances.
Of course moderating posts/comments and banning offenders should be the first step in any moderation decision. However, when the users you ban keep coming from the same few servers, the story changes.
If this is a big server, a decent defence would be “bigger server, more asshats, more moderation required”. However, if you’re only a small instance with a few volunteer moderators, it doesn’t really matter how big the server sending all the problematic posts come from; the moderators are overworked, nobody else is volunteering to help, so something needs to be done.
In some cases, the problem is the other server. Freedom of speech absolutists tend to attract abusive assholes, for instance, and those servers simply cannot interoperate with normal servers because the admin disagrees with the concept. Some Fediverse servers are built around “legal” pornographic artwork but their users constantly cross the line. Or the admins have views that are incompatible with most other servers, so there’s no hope that they’ll ever prevent their users from exhibiting the same problematic behaviour.
Currently, Lemmy lacks moderation tools that Mastodon and other tools developed earlier (silencing servers, authorized fetch, and so on), but defederation will always happen. However, I think the current defederation tendencies within Lemmy are more to do with the small team of moderators. Servers with thousands of users and three or four actual moderators simply can’t take the load of per-user moderation for large instances, they’re busy enough making their own users stick to the rules.
the user of the free software in this case would be the server owner.
does bigotry count
The feature only lets you filter posts, not users from that instance.
