Because someone, eventually, is going to make this post anyway, we might as well get it over with. I know someone posted something a week ago, but I feel something a little more neutral would be useful.

There's a lot of talk on lemmy.world right now about lemmy.ml at an instance level (edit: see here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/20400058). A lot of it is very similar to the discussions we've had here before- accusations of ideologically-based censorship, promotion of authoritarian left propaganda, 'tankie-ism', etc. The subject of the admin's, and Lemmy dev's, political beliefs is back up as a discussion point. The word defederation is getting thrown around, and some of our beloved sh.it.heads are part of the conversation.

What do people think about lemmy.ml? Is there evidence that the instance is managed in such a way that it creates problems for Lemmy users, and/or users of sh.itjust.works specifically? Are they problems that extend to the entire instance or primary user base, or are the examples referenced generally limited to specific communities/moderators/users? Are people here, in short, interested in putting federation to lemmy.ml to a vote?

To our admin team and moderators: What are your experiences with lemmy.ml? Have you run into any specific problems with their userbase, or challenges related to our being federated with them?

Full disclosure: I have very little personal stake in this. I don't really engage with posts about international events, I don't share my political beliefs (such as they are) online beyond "Don't be a shitbag, help your fellow human out when you can", and have not run into any of the concerns brought up personally. But I'm also not the kind of user who would butt against this stuff often in the first place.

What I will say is that I have not personally witnessed activites like brigading or promotion of really nasty shit from lemmy.ml. I cannot say this about other instances we defederated from before. But again, this may just be a product of how I use Lemmy, and does not account for the experiences of others.

This is just an opportunity for those who do have strong opinions on this topic to say their piece and, more importantly, share their evidence.

If nothing else, given similar conversations a year ago, this will be an interesting account of what sh.itjust.works looks like today (happy belated cake day everybody!)

I am in the opinion that some alternative UIs should be available on the instance (domain) – if possible, of course. Lemmy.world already has many alt. UIs, I think we should have something like that. So, here's a list:

• Alexandrite – a nice modern one
• MLMYM – a familiar old-reddit–style one
• Nemmy
• Photon – sleek af
• Slemmy – again, a modern one
• Lemmy Modern UI – web default UI, but better

… and more, check out https://lemmy.world/post/465785

What do you think?

While Threads' integration with Mastodon has caused a big stir on both Mastodon and Lemmy, it is not the only for-profit company moving in that direction. Flipboard has announced it is embracing ActivityPub and gradually phasing in Mastodon integration. I have read elsewhere that Flipboard already works with Pixelfed, too. This is another big corporate participant in the Fediverse: "Flipboard notched more than 145 million monthly users and is tied with Twitter as among the top five traffic referrers on the web" according to this CNET article.

From what I can find online, Tumblr is also still slowly working to bring its 135 million monthly active users to the Fediverse via ActivityPub integration. I can only assume more companies will connect to the Fediverse as it grows.

In general, how do we want to treat commercial entities here? Should the Fediverse in general (and Lemmy in particular) attempt to be a non-commercial walled garden? Should we federate with commercial entities and leave users to block instances? Or should we federate with some organizations but not others, and if so what is a criteria for making that distinction?

I am expecting spicy comments since this is such a divisive issue. Please be civil and respectful.

(Side note: Users can now individually block instances in Lemmy 0.19, though it is not equivalent to defederation. From the release notes: "any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.")

Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?

Threads is the not-so-new reddit-like twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They're working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.

Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.

What do you think should be done?

EDIT: correction

EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.

Fediverse instances' status on federation with Threads

English message:

As some of you may have noticed, there's an instance with 1.1M bots reposting reddit posts and comments accross communities in several other instances.  

I expect there are multiple valid opinions on the subject and this thread is meant to get a feeling of everyone's opinion on the situation. 

You might also want to read lemmy.ca's discussion on that here which is a pretty decent thread about the subject.  

Things that I think need to be pointed out:  

• alien.top currently has 1.1M bots, only 6 of those are weekly users logging in. 
• together they've made 1.59M comments accross a multitude of communities in other instances.
• That project claims to be trying to get reddit users to switch to lemmy. 
• They have a portal to allow reddit users to claim and take over their bot persona. 
• alien.top has a single local community, the bots all post on different instances with copies of different subreddits.

I don't have an exhaustive list of such communities,  I haven't found an official one.  I'll post a fewfrom my personal blocklist in a comment below. 

And a note on the upcoming 0.19 release: 

• the new user-level instance block feature will block all the communities of the blocked instances,  but will not block these users' posts or comments if they are done on another instance's community.  

My opinion isn't any more valid then anyone else's so I'll put it in a comment below.

Our users' input is welcomed.

What do you, dear users of sh.itjust.works, think about federation with them?

Thanks

---

Message français:

Comme certains d'entre vous l'ont peut-être remarqué, il y a une instance peuplée de 1,1M de bots qui copient ees posts et commentaires Reddit dans plein de communautés sur plusieurs autres instances.

Il y a plusieurs opinions sur le sujet et ce fil de discussion vise à prendre le pouls de l'opinion générale sur la situation.

Je vous suggères de lire la discussion chez lemmy.ca à ce sujet ici, discussion intéressante. 

Quelques points qui, selon moi, doivent être soulignés :

• alien.top compte actuellement 1,1 million de robots, dont seulement 6 sont des utilisateurs hebdomadaires qui se login.
• collectivement, ils ont déjà fait 1,59 million de commentaires dans une multitude de communautés dans différentes instances.
• Ce projet proclame essayer de convertir des utilisateurs de Reddit à passer à Lemmy.
• Il existe un portail pour permettre aux utilisateurs de Reddit de prendre contrôle de leur version bot.
• alien.top a une seule communauté locale, les bots publient tous sur différentes instances, des copies de différents subreddits.

Je n'ai pas de liste exhaustive de ces communautés, à première vue, je n'en trouve pas une liste officielle.  Je mettrai dans un commentaire ci-dessous quelques communautés que j'ai bloqué au niveau personnel. 

Pour finir,  une note sur la version 0.19 de lemmy qui s'en vient :

• La nouvelle fonctionnalité pour bloquer une instance au niveau d'un uutilisateur bloquera toutes les communautés d'une instance bloquée, mais ne bloquera pas les publications ou les commentaires de ces utilisateurs s'ils sont publiés dans une communauté d'une autre instance.

Mon opinion n'est pas meilleur qu'une autre et je mettrai plutôt dans un commentaire ci-bas.

Les commentaires de nos utilisateurs sont les bienvenus.

Que pensez-vous, cher utilisateurs de sh.itjust.works de la fédération avec eux?

Merci

before people criticize me I am not using my main account because I do not feel safe bringing up these issues there, as these people and issues still are not dealt with. I do not want to put myself in danger, I will not be engaging in or attempting to post polls or votes here.

I would like to start by saying that I've noticed a lot of bad faith or spammy communities pop-up recently. The user is dramaticcat many of the communities break rules 1 and 2, maybe even rule 3 (an example of one such community is [email protected]) as they are purely dedicated to hatred, trolling, and possibly even spam.

Also a small handful of users have also been making threats or calls to violence and while these have been moderated nicely moderators and external instance admins the admins of this instance haven't done anything about this. This is worrying as admins are supposed to enforce the instance rules and remove disruptive users and communities who are in violation of said rules but the admins of Sh.itjust.works have not been doing that. This is a problem because it means that any malicious actor could join at any time and wreak havok on this instance just like Exploding-heads did on another unmoderated instance known as rammy.site way back when. We obviously know how that went.

It's important that we discuss this problem now while we might have a chance of contacting the admins rather than later when the damage has been done.

Hello everyone, I operate an instance previously defederated by this instance known as lemmy.comfysnug.space and we were defederated because many people didn't like our current rules.

Well we have since changed our rules and are no longer allowing the content that so many people complained about. So we were hoping to be able to get refederated with other instances including this one. What do people think, do we deserve a second chance to be federated again?

(I'm posting from a lemm.ee account because my main is on the Defederated Instance, there's no other real way for me to do this).

Please share your thoughts, concerns and opinions. Try to keep it constructive.

Link to announcement

Some of you may have noticed that there's a new bot in town. But this time, its one of ours.

What should we name it?

Post your entry.

Rules.

• The 5 most upvoted entries will be brought to a vote.
• The winning entry will become the display name of the bot.

The two obvious themes in my mind are gears/some sort of complex machine, or computer hardware/circuits.

As an avid Lain Iwakura enjoyer, I added that screenshot because it's awesome and I think it'd be an extremely cool banner, but there are probably much cleaner designs out there that would be more welcoming to new users. I'm sure you guys will be able to come up with some in short order.

You can look on lemmyverse.net to get a quick overview of some other instance banners.

I really don’t know how the formatting and proportions are supposed to work but I will edit that in as soon as someone clarifies.

Lemmy.world looks like this

!

This discussion will run for at least a week, and then we can take the most upvoted submissions in this thread and put them up for an official vote.

I've seen a lot of discussion about Threads around the fediverse and I believe our main instance community has had a few large discussions about it (here's a recent one).

I didn't see an Agora discussion post, so I'm making one.

Can we all discuss our opinions on whether we want this instance to remain federated with Threads or not and share our reasons? I'd appreciate it!

So the exploding heads vote is well past a day old now. The vote is almost unanimous to defederate. It's been obvious since a few hours after it went up what the community wants. It's now taken well past two weeks to defederate from an obvious alt right troll and bot platform. Twelve days of silence from admins, then a day long debate thread, then an interminable vote. I requested word on when the vote could be called closed, but my question was acknowledged and ignored.

For my own self, I have at this point no faith in the administration of this instance anymore to be able to handle this. It's very clear that wanting to not offend the alt-right is far, far more important than hearing the wishes of the users, and always has been. However, this is the agora, so I'm open to hear a counterpoint explaining why it's actually very reasonable to spend weeks upon weeks in endless circling debate over whether or not it's fine to joke about murdering marginalized people.

Edit: since my thread was locked and I can't reply to accusations, I only joined beehaw because of this, about two days ago. I'm not "a beehaw user", I've barely got my account there active. On this site I have a community and four hundred posts, but I'll be closing that now.

I opened this thread after seeking comment and being ignored for a week. You can see it in my post history if you like. That's enough of that for me.

Please consider using my theme on this instance, so that everyone could enjoy a more more modern, efficient UI when browsing sh.itjust.works. It works with Lemmy 0.17, 0.18 and 0.18.1rc. It has a light theme variant, dark theme or both (auto).

!screenshot 1

!screenshot 2

!screenshot 3

Repository with more screenshots: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon

Theme files for download: https://github.com/pkrasicki/lemmy-modern-ui-theme-addon/releases

It's also a Firefox addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lemmy-modern-ui-theme

The only downside would be maintenance. Whenever a new version of Lemmy breaks the theme, someone will have to fix it. But I believe that together as a community we can easily maintain our own theme.

We should try to keep this instance as a Free Speech destination, rather than yet another island controlled by the thought police.

Could we please set some rules for defederation? I'd like to suggest these two:

1. Is it spam?
2. Is it illegal?

If either is yes, then go ahead and ban it, otherwise allow free discussion and don't get upset that some people think differently than yourself.

Exploding-heads.com is another instance on Lemmy where alt-right MAGA types tend to reside. Some people on this server want us to defederate from them immediately, some people want to save defederation as a last resort. They have 104 active users (more stats below).

!

It seems that exploding-heads has also experienced a recent botswarm invasion. This is obviously another point in favor of defederating them, assuming you are worried about botswarms, which is currently being discussed here.

My advice to you all is please try to discuss this in a civil manner, we need not allow them to create divisive conflict inside our communities. No matter how the vote turns out, you're not going to be able to defederate from your fellow sh.itheads so be nice.

I've linked many of the previous discussions below so people who are out of the loop can get a general sense of the situation.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/216888 https://sh.itjust.works/post/225714 https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126 https://sh.itjust.works/post/410325

Lemmy.world just recently defederated them.

https://lemmy.world/post/747912

https://lemmy.world/post/577526

Although this could be considered a point in favor of defederation, it actually means even if we vote to remain federated, people have a great alternative in lemmy.world where they can still participate in our communities and simultaneously be protected from exploding-heads.

Ensuring diversity of servers is beneficial to the platform as a whole, but it is also not our responsibility to bear that burden.

TLDR, just wrap up any last points in this thread before we open the vote tomorrow. Please be civil.

EDIT: To clarify, this isn't the official vote, this is the final discussion. The vote thread will be posted tomorrow and you will only be allowed to make a single comment saying Aye or Nay.

EDIT2: Vote thread is up, this thread is now locked. Very lively discussion thread sh.itheads. Please try to be more respectful next time.

If you look at the top ~20 servers on fedidb, they are very clearly botswarms. Either intentionally set up that way, or accidentally due to turning off protections and not deleting users.

You can tell this because they have 70,000 registered users, but only 10 of them are active.

I believe we should pre-emptively defederate with botswarms before they're turned on. If the instance owners clear out the bots on their instances (like lemmy.ninja did) then they should be immediately refederated.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want this place to be drowned in spam as soon as they're activated.

It seems like the mod has abandoned the community and none of the posts seem like a very good look for our instance. [email protected]

Everyone I have something very important to say about The Agora.

The Problem

Let me be super clear here to something people don't seem to understand about lemmy and the fediverse. Votes mean absolutely nothing. No less than nothing.

In the fediverse, anyone can open a instance, create as many users as they want and one person can easily vote 10,000 times. I'm serious. This is not hard to do.

Voting at best is a guide to what is entertaining.

As soon as you allow a incentive the vast majority of votes will be fake. They might already be mostly fake.

If you try to make any decision using votes as a guide someone WILL manipulate votes to control YOU.

one solution (think of others too!)

A counsel of trusted users.

The admin, top mods may set up a group to decide on who to ban and what instances to defederate from. You will not get it right 100% of the time but you also won't be controlled by one guy in his basement, running 4 instances and 1,000 alts.

Now i'm gonna go back to shit posting.

First, on behalf of @imaqtpie, @Seraph089 and myself, thank you all for choosing us to help run the community. We're all really excited about the possibilities of both this instance and of The Agora community. We're look forward to working with everyone to make this a great community. Feel free to reach out with any concerns or comments!

Ok, on to the announcement:

Today, I'm excited to share with you some pivotal updates set to streamline our interaction and decision-making processes within The Agora.

The first of these updates is about enhancing transparency. We have established a new and convenient way to track the outcomes of our community decisions. Simply visit this link: https://rentry.co/the_agora. This site will serve as the hub for all voting results, updated at the conclusion of each vote.

Next, let's discuss the changes regarding the use of our existing [Discussion] and [Vote] tags. To foster clarity and improved interaction, all new posts should now carry the [Discussion] tag.

Regarding the [Vote] tags, we're introducing a more structured approach here. Going forward, the [Vote]s will be initiated by the moderation team based on the week's [Discussion] posts and will be posted each Friday and run to the following Friday. This gives ample time for each of us to participate in the decision-making process. Once a vote concludes, the corresponding thread will be locked and the results promptly updated on our new voting results webpage.

For [Vote] posts, your vote should only be cast as a top-level comment. To streamline the process, we ask that you refrain from responding to other votes in the same thread or making non-voting comments. Each [Vote] post will contain details on how to format your comments, and our moderation team will be available to ensure all comments are formatted correctly before the final vote count is tallied.

This is by no means the final process and we're depending on your feedback and discussion to keep improving things going forward.

We understand the concerns about vote manipulation and the discussions around alternate voting methods (like ranked choice). Use this thread to discuss the changes and any concerns or suggestions that you have.

As of now, the tentative plan is to run with this for the first week, see how many issues exist that require voting, generate the vote threads, complete a round of votes and then iterate on the process once we can all see what works and what doesn't work so well.

We should do our absolute best to not become a siloed instance. I predict we will start seeing certain instances be almost inaccessible which will lead to their users migrating to more open instances. It's already becoming clear to me that certain instances will lose users over time if they continue actively segregating their instance from others.

Individual bad actors on other instances is not a good enough reason to defederate. If a troll is bothing someone they can be blocked/banned on sh.itjust.works. I don't expect instance creators to ban all trolls, it's not possible.

Defederation should be reserved for severe cases when another instance shows no interest in moderating. The two instances defederated right now are justified: one condones the denial historical events and actively censors opposition, and the other was condoning heinous illegal activies regarding underage individuals. These are two clear examples of where defederation makes sense.

Defederation should only be used as a last resort.

My previous post continues this sentiment from a couple days ago here: https://sh.itjust.works/post/281126