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the whole de-federating thing is seriously turning me off to the whole concept of lemmy, it's like little dictators with their sceptres cutting off entire communities from each other. it's a major flaw and I hope it gets addressed as lemmy/fediverse evolves, or else it's not going to work
Eh, if it were easier to block an instance as a user, I'd be 100% with you instead of 95%.
There are instances that are batshit crazy. Since blocking an instance as a user just ain't possible yet, I can see why defederation before trouble gets going is useful. Once the nasty side of the internet gets snowballing, it's much harder to manage.
Troll, or serious extremist, some things are just cancerous.
Because some problems require a hammer and others require orbital nukes...
This is a good point
Since blocking an instance as a user just ain’t possible yet
I don't think that would solve the legal issue so it doesn't really matter in many cases. Even if you personally blocked an instance, your home instance will still recieve copies of that instance as long as someone else is interacting with it. And with that comes the fear of unintentionally hosting something illegal on your instance becasue you have the copies from that other instance.
So again there would be no other solution than defederating.
This!
People can block communities right? That might make more sense than just severing connections to other servers completely?
See, that would be such a better option. Let individual users block servers from appearing for them alone in any interactive sense. The Beehaw defederation was not only terrible timing, but it exposed the biggest achilles heel of this whole idea.
Can you elaborate more on this? Its a tangent, but one I'm out of the loop on.
Why DID beehaw split?
I'm not fully in the know on this by any means, but from what I understand, Beehaw's admins/mods decided to defederate from sh.itjustwor.ks and lemmy.world because of an inability to moderate effectively due to the massive influx of new Lemmy users last week - most of which were in those two instances, as they have open registration.
Beehaw requires you to apply to join.
How would splitting off fix that problem, though? If 100k users joined beehaw, and they stop syncing with the rest of the federation, they still have 100k new users to moderate.
Or am I looking at this backwards, and they want their gated garden, absent of slugs?
Beehaw would not let 100k users into their platform to start with. They will grow according to their means to moderate. That's why they only allow sign-ups through application, go bring down the number of new sign-ups and filter by quality.
I think there's definitely a bit of a gated-garden mentality here, but it's mostly just being overwhelmed. If they had more help, or had ASKED for more help, it would probably have been much different. I'm new here myself so I'm not going to pretend to understand the nuances here.
The general way I’ve been putting things around federation is that it’s a different kind of friction from corporate big social, and there’s an adjustment period needed for both admins and users.
We’ve kinda gotten used to all living under one big umbrella corporation and tolerating their untouchable shadowy actions, as well as the convenience and relative simplicity that brings.
Federation is more chaos but also more human and flexible. So we get more interpersonal friction and less convenience, but more choice and direct connectivity to the admins. Arguably more accountability or transparency from admins too, but I think that’s the part that needs the most growth largely because many don’t know what that really looks like.
The transition can be tough sometimes. A loss of convenience can make us entitled and drama can be a real turn off. But I think it’s useful to think about how much our tolerance goes down when we can put an identity to an action we don’t like. It’s also useful to think about whether the friction of federation is more like real human interactions and whether that’s healthy.
I’m not a decentralisation fanboy. I tend to be critical of it actually, but I think there are trade offs both ways.
Or am I looking at this backwards, and they want their gated garden, absent of slugs?
You could say that, they have said more than once that they want their instance to be their safe-space, which is cool and all, if their users are all up on defederating at the fall of a leaf along with the mods that's cool, the "problematic" part are the users that join that instance because it's big but don't expect them to be like that, because then they have to drop that account and create another in a different instance.
But I've said it more than once, until we get migration tools think of your account as disposable or prepare to keep multiple accounts to juggle servers.That said, I think they would be happier using a forum-like server instead of the fediverse because they seem like the kind of instance to end up isolating themselves.
the “problematic” part are the users that join that instance because it’s big but don’t expect them to be like that, because then they have to drop that account and create another in a different instance.
Not even that, it also affects users on other big instances that happen to be defederated by beehaw and with beehaw still hosting some of the biggest tech and gaming communities, users won't have access to that depending on which other instance they joined.
Hard disagree, I keep seeing the same news/posts inside and outside Beehaw in other instances that have their own community, sometimes they even have the same name.
if you joined lemmy.world for example as a new user,
you won't be able to see new comments made by users of beehaw.org. Only those who were made before defederation because they're still part of the copy of your instance.Edit: Had it backwards, you can see their posts, but you're still affected by the defederation because you can't interact with them since they won't see your posts, regardless on which instance you make it.
And if you comment on a community that is actually hosted direclty on beehaw.org, no other user from any other instance will see your posts because beehaw won't publish comments from your instance to the other ones.The admin of lemm.ee just wrote a long post about the consequences of the latest defederations of instances that are most likely spam bots
What does defederation mean for me as a lemm.ee user?
You will not be able to see any new posts or comments from defederated instances made on ANY instance.
You will still be able to see old ones that they made before defederation
Users from defederated instances will not be able to post or comment at all in communities hosted on lemm.ee
I remember mods saying that it was too much work managing the trolls and other "offensive" content so by splitting it was easier for them to control
You’d think the concept of letting users choose their instance would also apply to letting the user choose to block or not. It’s not like the entire instance is full of Donald users, just one crappy part of it.
Tell that to admins with strong opinions, and other admins who don't wanna anger admins with strong opinions and get defederated for not defederating the offenders.
That's the part that gets me. Like, I'm all for "it's your server do what you want," but I do judge you if your reason for defederating my server is something so stupid as "this other server says they're bad, so I'll trust that."
You fools ain't never had a friend spread a runor about another friend? Never watched a sitcom? People lie lol, if you're going to make overarching decisions that affect your users too, you could maybe stand to do a modicum of your own research into it instead of just letting the one you "trust" bully you into compliance simply because this other masto instance doesn't cater specifically to marxists, and "capitalists are nazis" so they must be banned or else they'll speak!
My masto server is defederated for being anti trans, yet one of our organizations key members has been a trans woman since 1981 and she's one of the most prolific posters on the server (and one of the best, I might add). We're labeled "anti trans" simply because we didn't defederate with a server that is actually anti trans when the "good guys" tried to bully my admin into it, but the admin respects us enough to allow us to make our own decisions regarding what we want to see or not see on our feed, so of course that suggests to these reactionaries that he wants to somehow exterminate the jewish people.
I'd be more open to it frankly if I wasn't a direct example of how that system can be and is being abused to create echo chambers and bully those who don't want to live in them. By all means, your server your right to do so, but my right to think you're a bad person for it if it's for silly unresearched reasons such as this. And you might say "they don't have the time to investigate everything, so they just throw the book at it." Well, they chose to become admins, they chose that job, maybe managing a public server just isn't for them, I know I don't have the time, that's why I don't do it.
Completely agree. Admins are free to defederate. Users are free to heavily criticize and leave. That's how freedom works. 😊
Yes, just venting my personal grievances with the reacionary culture of the fedi at large. I think the fediverse would be perfect if most of the moderation (regarding cultivating your feed and blocking instances, communities, and users) was placed on the individual, barring outright illegal content like CP, revenge porn, or beastiality which should of course be nuked from orbit and are all actually illegal.
I'd like to see the culture go not from dictator (reddit) to smaller dictators (lemmy), but from dictator (reddit) to anarchism (lemmy, but with more community decision making for themselves as an individual rather than The Council of Beehaw and The Council of Lemmy.world deciding all their peasants are at war with each other.)
Admins are effectively dictators. Some do have anarchistic views such as lemmy.dbzer0.com (and even there, to what extent?). The vast majority only care about themselves and what is theirs. No authority with absolute power will submit themselves to the will of a collective of strangers.
My masto admin still is free to ban people he doesn't like from his server of course, he just would rather we be able to curate our own feeds, and I'm sure curates his own just the same as we do. He didn't abdicate the throne I suppose by the nature of being the server owner, and our server is private (exclusive to those in a particular club,) I guess he's just a benevolent dictator. Still though, I like his approach.
This is why I'm happy to be on my own private instance and part of what really turned me on to Lemmy. It's trivial to spin up your own instance if you're technically inclined. You have complete control over what you see and aren't subject to some power hungry admin on some server like Beehaw. That's what makes the fediverse so great imo
I was trying to set up my own 0.17.4 instance for a week. I have used docker professionally. 0.17.4 wasn't trivial to set up. The instructions were full of errors and omissions. I basically had to rewrite the whole docker-compose.yml myself.
Of course, right when I was at the finish line, they released 0.18.0 and rewrote the instructions, and now it gets you 90% of the way right out of the box. There was still one omission to pull an nginx config file, and then you need to get your own certificate and add it to that config file (or use a reverse proxy, but I have no need for that at the moment).
At least it's much easier than it was 3 days ago.
If I didn't already have a bunch of shit running in containers that I don't want to risk messing up, I would have looked into using their Ansible instructions. But I really don't like running scripts on my server (especially as root!) unless I know everything that it's doing.
Trivial probably wasn't the best choice of word. I will say the effort was worth it
Sounds painful. Hopefully, you embraced the FOSS mindset and contributed the missing 10% to the docs.
I planned to, but I'm not even sure how. The docs aren't just a file in the GitHub that I can edit.
Aren't they? I didn't check but the docs for my open source stuff are just markdown in the same repository that gets built on release.
Edit: found them
Thanks, I'll give this an update today.
Updated the docs. The change got merged in this morning.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/pull/236/commits/6222f9bf042d7e5421792ee3b80ff24add7e7d20
Nice job :D
How hard would you say it is for a non-programmer to set up their own instance?
Now that most of the issues are resolved, I would say none of it is really an issue you would need to be a programmer to resolve. More that you would need to have experience setting up websites.
I also set mine up manually. There are a half a dozen or so different scripts that will set it up for you, including an official one here. I generally don't feel comfortable running scripts on my server, so I avoid this if possible. But if you don't have anything else on your server that you're afraid it will fuck up, this is probably the easiest way to do it. You're basically installing one command line program, on your laptop, then running the script. You'll just need WSL2 on your laptop, be comfortable with CLI, and know how to git clone a repository. All that stuff can be easily googled.
I mean I'd rather people have freedom over their property (aka their servers) than one entity be able to dictate to the entirety of lemmy.
If I set up a server my instance will have my rules. I won't allow NSFW nor will I allow any hate speech or promotion of extremist views such as nazism, fascism, imperialism, anything encouraging violence or threats, religious extremist beliefs such as sharia law and fundamental Christianity etc.
I would not federate with any instances that break MY rules. That's why it's my instance. I made it, maintain it. My interest isn't getting as many people on my instance as possible but to give a space for people who want to participate on that kind of instance. Some instances will focus on hating LGBT and being sexist etc and while that's horrific they're allowed to do whatever as long as it doesn't break lemmy TOS which i honestly don't know what it is. Anyway, it's weird to see anyone label freedom to do what one wants with their property as being dictators.
The problem with defederation is that it causes damage to the wider network, and can be far too easily abused.
It makes instance selection very important to the user (which is already a major friction point). And causes terrible UX when users can't figure out why content is unavailable to them.
It can also be used as a weapon by powerhungry admins to force centralization around their instance.
I know there aren't really great alternatives to defederation for content moderation right now. But I think that these could easily be implemented. For example, instances could maintain a 'blocklist' which users could automatically be subscribed to upon joining, but they would be able to inspect and 'opt-out' from blocking certain instances or categories if they desired.
I think this is a good balance of protecting users, and also respecting their freedom.
Keep in mind that this doesn't mean they could POST rule breaking content. (They are still users of your instance after all). Just that they would have the choice of which content they feel comfortable with VIEWING.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And defederation is a nuclear powered sledgehammer lol.
There is no lemmy TOS by the way. There is no central authority to all of this. Much like real life, people tend to stay away from the weirdos and in the fediverse they just defederate from a group of weirdos if it becomes too bad.
But to be honest, defederation is an absolutely minor inconvenience. Most important instance will of course cooperate and have similar rules. It's just that we are on a very young platform right now and the moderation tools are not as advanced as elsewhere. Currently, defederation is just a temporary band-aid solution to make the admin's lifes easier. It'll get better and sort itself out over time.
If you like spreading hate, you will of course always have a problem with defederation. You likely won't be able to participate in normal discussions on normal instances as well as vile portrayals of humanities' worst with the same account. But that's not a new concept. People have had two accounts for normal discussion and things like NSFW subs before.
there is no "lemmy TOS". lemmy is only a piece of software that can be ran on a server. it is licensed under the GNU Affero GPL, a copyleft free software license.
this means that pretty much the only legal "terms" you need to abide to run the software on a server is that if you modify it in any way, you have to publish the source code so that others can freely read and modify your version, the way you read and modified the original (this is what copyleft means; it's the exact opposite of copyright).
the instance owner is the only one providing any "service" here, and as such they decide their terms (the site-wide rules for an instance). if you run your own instance on your own server, you are the only one who can dictate any "terms of service".
all of this is by design; the fediverse would be pretty useless if anyone could impose a global "terms of service" over it.
O no, the platform is operating exactly as intended.
If creating little islands is the intended way of using lemmy then why bother with federation in the first place? Not to mention that carving up the fediverse robs it of the prospect of at some point replacing big players like reddit.
So you would prefer massive dictators with a profit motive instead? Because that's the alternative you are advocating for.
The entire point of federation as a tool of decentralisation is to address the issue of Spez, Musk, Zuckerberg and so on. Massive corporate dictators of the internet.
The solution is to split up the massive dictators into lots and lots of smaller ones, who can federate with who they want to in order to make a bigger space, and ultimately provide you with the choice of which approach you like better. It ultimatley allows all of these spaces to shut out corporate advertising as well because if McDonalds ever makes a fucking instance everyone will defederate that shit to get away from the advertising immediately.
If you like the mega dictators better. Reddit is over there. I assume you do not, because that's why you left it.
Don't show your ass like this. Don't do the "oh you like waffles so you hate pancakes?????" meme. I didn't say or suggest a single thing you just said.
What I actually DID say is that allowing
modsadmins to defederate entire communities is stupid. If you want to talk about THAT, fine.EDIT: admins, not mods, my mistake, thanks god
Admins* defederate instances*. Mods only have power inside their /c/ community.
I didn’t say or suggest a single thing you just said.
Of course you did. You said that the defederating thing turns you off the concept of Lemmy, and you advocated for it to be not-a-feature.
You are advocating for centralised mega platforms owned by mega dictators.
The are two options. Centralisation, or decentralisation. That's it. There is no magic alternative. This is the material reality that exists.
If it turns you off Lemmy, then what you are advocating for is centralisation. The literal polar opposite of what the entire fediverse aims to be and exists to solve. There is not an alternative and there will not be. You either get one owner of a super site or thousands of owners of minisites that federate in order to be emulate a supersite without the oversight. That's it. There is no third-way.
Criticizing and mentioning flaws of a system doesn't automatically make a person against the system.
Accepting the current flaws and then working on their solutions is the way to make Lemmy better for everyone.
The system IS federation.
It's not criticising flaws in a system, it's literally asking to dismantle it entirely. You can't have the fediverse or decentralisation without federation. That's the issue.
You either have centralisation. Or you have decentralised federation as a means of providing the size that centralised social media can reach without the centralisation part.
The crying about it being a flaw is just people whining about wanting what they're used to with absolutely no differences. They need to be told to simply get used to it with none of this babying. Their crappy suggestions and complaints are antithetical to the entire goal of fediverse.
All of them will go back to reddit and then find themselves back here in a few years when it's the content slop machine that they want it to be. They don't actually care about the goal, they just want slop and are unhappy that their are complications about getting their slop.
You and me both. Presumably a lot of others as well.
Feels like Lemmy is going to shoot itself in the foot with this.
It seems inevitable!
Yep, I feel the same way. Feels like I'm missing out on a bunch of stuff.
thankfully, that isn't really the case on your (which also happens to be my) instance.
we've been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de, for having open signups, which i'm sure is something we could hash out with them in the future. (technically there are also instances that block us which are run by single persons for their own use. in effect, this amounts to a single user blocking us for themselves, which obviously is fine).
we ourselves have defederated from precisely one instance - lemmygrad.ml, the political one for authoritarian communists. this was probably done to avoid unpleasant political spam posts from showing up. personally, i think we could get rid of even this one block as the users can decide whether to block that instance for themselves or not; i might post asking about it later.
and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues. this statement more than anything really made me feel like i chose the right instance.
FMHY for the win!
we’ve been blocked by precisely one actual instance - the predominantly German-speaking feddit.de
Which also was my first home instance until I noticed that a comment chain I accidentaly started using another lemmy instance was not visible when looking at the thread though feddit. Not even my own comments made with an instance that wasn't blocked. Turns out the user I answered to start that chain was a member of your instance and thus the comment and everything following it was not visible for feddit users.
Which is why I'm a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^
and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues.
That's the policy of lemm.ee too. It has 34 blocked instances right now but those are all suspicious ones that formed and got >30K users within a couple hours and no activity at all.
But ultimately, new users shouldn't have to worry about such things, which is why I can't see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.
Everywhere it says it's not relevant where you sign up because you can see all the stuff from other instances anyway, but that's simply not true, it DOES matter where you sign up and even after that you could be forced to change your instance when the defederation roulette starts spinning again.and most importantly, the admins here have explicitly stated that the policy is to avoid defederation at all possible avenues.
Which is why I’m a full time lemm.ee user for now bc at the time it had 0 blocked instances and was blocked by 0 too^^
aye, that's the real beauty of the fediverse; every person can find an instance which suits their preferences. those like us can find more hands-off instances if we want to, and equally people who prefer more moderation can easily find a more heavily moderated/curated instance.
But ultimately, new users shouldn’t have to worry about such things, which is why I can’t see Lemmy growing as a whole with the tools available now.
maybe an unpopular opinion, but i don't care so much about lemmy growing. it's great right now, having achieved a lot of growth recently bringing lots of interesting content and community, but still not being so big to the point where all the disadvantages of a reddit-sized userbase start to show.
hell, maybe it's better that lemmy never grows as big as the centralized sites, the people who prefer all the advantages of decentralized social media can move here, whereas those who prioritize convenience/ease of use can stay on the big sites. the annoyance of defederations is in some sense just a part of how the protocol works, and not something that can be "solved" per se; the people who are here choose to put up with it in exchange for all the advantages.
one thing that could be done though, is for the lemmy software to have an easy option for migrating all your account data like mastodon does. the poor lemmy devs (literally just 2 dudes) are up to their necks in water just keeping track of the flood in the issues and pull requests right now, so it's not likely lemmy will get new features soon, but hopefully people will step in to help them as well. if i was good enough at rust (or programming in general) i'd try to help too.
maybe an unpopular opinion, but i don’t care so much about lemmy growing. it’s great right now, having achieved a lot of growth recently bringing lots of interesting content and community, but still not being so big to the point where all the disadvantages of a reddit-sized userbase start to show.
Yeah it doesn't have to get as big as reddit and I don't think it ever will, but at least right now I feel my "All" feed doesn't really change that much within 2-3 days so I'd like a couple more users on here^^
Dumb question, but have you tried changing from "Active" sort type (the default) to "New"? I had the same problem till I found that with lemmy's size at present, "New" is better at bringing you actually new posts from the past few hours rather than staying the same for days. Though maybe that only works for me because of the number of communities I'm subscribed to. Which is another thing that might help; discovery is a little difficult right now so best to use an external site like https://lemmyverse.net/ to find communities that interest you.
I mostly used "Top day" recently, "New" isn't really good with "All", more with "Subscribed".
Browsing lemmyverse.net is useful when I actively want to search for a specific community.
With the current size of Lemmy, I mostly use "All" because I might find interesting stuff from comunities that I didn't think of before.Fair enough, some more growth would do good
You know you can block all the way down at the IP level, right?
I don’t know how any of this works either, but I’m hoping for a solution that makes it harder for owners of large instances throwing their weight around to affect the users so drastically.
Something I can imagine would be the ability to be logged in to multiple accounts at once, so a user could see and interact with multiple unlinked instances seamlessly. Commenting or posting in a community would default to either an account made in that communities instance, or the next available account in a linked instance.
I think this is sort of how it works now, we’re just missing the ability to make the experience seamless.
It's not going to get addressed because it can't be, other than running your own Lemmy instance and just federating with everyone, until the main instances turn off blocklists and instead use allowlists.
Don't even have to run your own. I know most people think Lemmy is just lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, and Beehaw but there's a ton of instances up right now with open registration. Of course, if you want full control over what you see you will need to run your own, or at least make a few accounts. I think one of the real growing pains is these monolithic instances where everybody is flocking to. Not that I blame anyone, but it's concentrating too much power and too much content in a single place. It would've been much more preferable at least for the communities to all have been spread out over a dozen or so instances, but it was hard enough already just to explain what the fediverse is to people to begin with.
Think about it like this, if you loose a community the members can just jump to another instance that is more reliable.
At least they don't have to go through a platform change. Max max you have to create the subs you lost in other instances and improve on them. Beasides we can still see beehaw, we just can comment, also easy to create your own account in beehaw if you really miss a specific sub. Easy to change too
Yep, this exact situation is why this whole federation thing is never ever going to catch on as much as Digg and Reddit did. I’m all for a good Reddit alternative but I really don’t think this will be it.
The history of the fediverse has been paved with comments like this. Many thought lemmy would never be as populated as it is right now.
Truth is broad unsubstantiated critiques are easy to make. Constructive criticism harder. Actually trying to make things better even harder.
How much is your critique just “I don’t like a loss of some convenience even if it is the trade off for choice, diversity and non-profit corporatisation of my online social life”?