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I made the mistake of replying to someone in Chapotraphouse once, something I considered fairly innocuous like Biden had done better than my initial absolutely zero expectations for him.
What followed was a hailstorm of WEEKS of replies with the most batshit insane - and more importantly derogatory and demeaning - replies, worse even than I had experienced on Reddit, which at this point is really saying something! I stopped replying, I think I deleted the original comment or edited to say that I would no longer be replying, nothing helped. My consent to the "dunking" process was irrelevant - never mind that I was not OP, never mind that I had not read the community statement prior to engaging bc it appeared as an isolated post in my All feed, I was now being used as a target to vomit their feefees (feelings) all over onto.
And then a week later I did the same in a lemmygrad.ml post. I almost left the Fediverse after that - there is zero reason to put up with such nonconsensual and unannounced shit voluntarily. However, I was not made aware bc I was relatively new to the Fediverse, and my prior instance (Kbin.Social) had preemptively defederated from them, so I had no idea what I was walking into. Fortunately v0.19.3 came out allowing user blocking of an entire instance, so I blocked them all, recently adding lemmy.ml to that list, and now I'm happy.
So go to those instances at your own risk. No, it's nowhere close to mere differences in "political thinking", it's more like if you want a polite conversation using factual statements and logical reasoning vs. the polar opposite of that where if you don't parrot the talking points precisely then you get ridiculed ruthlessly for not knowing their internal set of "alternative fact talking points". i.e., I suppose it's what passes for "political differences" these days, like Russia would like to commit genocide in Ukraine while the latter would like that to not happen - you know, a "political difference".
If you are interested, here is a link to where I previously answered someone asking why people defederate from hexbear.net, including a link to read their very own words along with my commentary on that.:-)
Yeah, I don't feel a need to block people who are behaving badly around me. Perhaps I would if I had been inundated like you were. That said, I fully support you, me, or anyone else doing what they have to to maintain perspective and mental health, and I'm glad there are tools to facilitate that even if I never feel the need to use them.
Yeah it's not just "around" but "to" me as in several tens of replies, first in Chapotraphouse, and then all that again in lemmygrad.ml.
Tbf, they should feel absolutely free to be however they want - if that's their therapy to dunk on people - but that shit needs to be labelled in my strong opinion. Like someone can drink their own urine that's fine, but don't put it in a glass and tell me it's Mountain Dew:-D. Consent makes all the difference!!
Anyway, beyond my "delicate sensibilities", this tolerance of the intolerant affects us all. People are leaving, or not joining, the Fediverse b/c of this. I used to recommend it to people but I no longer do that. We talk collectively as if we desire more content, yet we turn away the source of that content - people. This singular issue has the potential to doom this project to failure from the start. Not entirely - b/c some people will remain no matter what happens - but for it to gain wider traction, we need to get past this. Consent should make all the difference! (But right now, it does not.)
So that is why I don't shut up about it:-). Even though it happened months in the past, and I've long since blocked them all. It does affect you - and all of us - even if only indirectly.
I'm just spitballing here, top of my head ideas, so not in anyway thought out finished concepts. Now with that being said, what if the fediverse handled the situation like this......
You, someone who's never heard of the fediverse goes to "Lemmy.com" and this website is not an instance. It's just a place to learn how the fediverse works, and gives you suggestions based on your input on where you might be happiest.
Maybe it has a spotlight on popular instances. Or a trending instances showcase. Whatever the case, you enter maybe 10 interests you have, gender, political leanings, ect. And it gives you a list of what it thinks you might like.
You can totally ignore it's suggestions, and join WHATEVER instance. The issue I had as a new user, is that I didn't know SHIT about Lemmy when I joined. I joined Lemmy.World because it seemed to be the most popular one. It's what google recomended.
I know you can export your settings. But step 1 in my opinion is being able to LITERALLY move your whole account. Post history, comments, up/downvotes, settings, preferences, subscribed communities. EVERYTHING.
So if I want to hop to another community, all I gotta do is go into settings, click the "change host instance" button, enter in my new instance, confirm I DO actually want to move everything, and then poof, now I'm somewhere else with no consequence to myself.
Now, since I said EVERYTHING moves with you, it also means this isn't a way to get around community bans. If a community banned you a year ago, you can't just switch instances and not be banned. You're still banned.
And anyone that YOU banned will remain in your banned list.
So that brings us to defederation. Right now, defederation is just permanent for the whole group. Two instances don't get along? Well now both communities userbases suffer for it. So what I suggest is that we reinvent the idea of what defederating is. Let's say two communities don't get along, and so the mods decide to defederate. Now you, as the user will get a message. "Such and Such instance that you're hosted on has decided to defederate from Such and Such Other instance. Do you agree?" If you say yes, then you have joined the defederation. You personally are defederated. If you say no, you remain federated with them. And any defederation the community has already done will be the default settings for that community. If for any reason you wish to re-federate at a later date, or upon signup, all you do is flip the switch back on for that comminity. Now you alone are re-federated with that community, but the default community stance is defederated.
And I know you can individually block the communitys and instances already, but this is more like giving the individual communities a personality. These are the values this community stands for. There may be individuals here who disagree with our stance, but this is generally the vibe we're looking to achieve here.
They could even have a link on every sidebar of defederated communities, along with a message from the mods under each one as long or as short as the mods want to write, that explains what happened so you can decide if their values line up with yours, or if you care. They could also show you numbers of who's following the defederation, or NOT following the defederation. So you get an idea of if that defederation actually is something that represents the people.
You could even hold votes inside the community. "Should we defederate from so and so?" and act accordingly upon the election end.
Because I've been pounding this point since I got here, that if you want to grow the userbase, you need to understand something very simple. Users are PEOPLE. People want easy. If blonde valley girl bimbo britney needs to think about something, it's too hard for her.
But at the same time, I TOTALLY get what you're going for with the decentralized approach to social media. So, for those who care about that, I think this method gives them control. Gives them access to tools to manage their own feeds. For those who just want to browse cat pictures and upvote them, and say "Awwww, cute kitty", they are already protected from what their instance considers to be harmful people. They don't have to think about hexbear, or lemmy.ml, or whatever that other instance that's shutting down.
But I'm not a code writer. I'm sure all the techies are going to give me 101 reasons why I'm wrong, why my opinions don't matter, and how stupid I am. Because that's just what the internet is these days.
The Lemmy developers don't seem keen on writing that code to help people leave their instance, possibly bc they also administer the Lemmy.ml instance too and its a conflict of interest scenario, but I think rather that it is simply the case that the software is still in an advanced alpha / early beta stage of development. Many other features were simply a higher priority for them to want to work on. One day maybe they'll get to that though.
In the meantime, supposedly the ability to label content has already been added to the latest software release - v0.19.4. It will take some time to update various instances though - maybe half a year - and e.g. if you scroll to the bottom of your feed you'll see those UI and BE numbers for your own instance, Lemmy.World, are still at 0.19.3. As people upgrade, it would be good to label the most extremist instances like: "many people on these instances are often rude, condescending, and will spam your notifications for weeks after you indicate that you don't want replies anymore, and their admins refuse to do anything about it and sometimes even join in the fun"... or perhaps something more politely worded.:-P
With such a label, new users would not have to depend upon reaching any particular website that explains things - they could come here and start using the Fediverse directly, immediately:-). Another alternative that an instance admin mentioned is automatically blocking "those instances", but with a bot sending a new user information about how to remove the block, if they have a thicker skin and would like to engage. That would change everything, imho, bc it makes going to such a place consensual, which really does make a huge difference. If someone wants to get "dunked on", then by all means, enjoy! :-D
But it would protect people from wandering into "those places" without knowing. Which increases freedom for everyone across the entire Fediverse, especially since normal/average users may then be more comfortable to be on the Fediverse, and contribute their posts and comments and such:-). So I 100% get what you are saying - we need moar pictures of cute kittens, not fewer! But... it will take time. And in the meantime, this place is only for either those with a thick skin, and/or someone willing to put in the time and effort to learn how to use it i.e. to study the responses, identify where they come from, then block them to curate their overall experience - very much similar to needing to configure a Linux machine imho:-).
Yeah, I get what you're saying and you absolutely shouldn't have to put up with stuff you're not okay with. That's the whole difficulty of free speech. You may have a right to be an asshole, but I have a right to not listen to assholes. And some of these places definitely have a lot of assholes, and do nothing to rein them in, then act surprised when no one wants to be associated with their space.
Disclaimer: I too can be an asshole at times, and I totally understand if people want to block me. That's the joy of freedom.
Me too:-). Anyone who says otherwise is surely lying, even if only fooling themselves. :-P
Speaking of, I found it interesting to read hexbear.net's own words as they defederated from other instances, even against the will of their users - i.e. they collected poll results, then went 100% in the opposite direction as they indicated:-P. Many of the individual users were saying similarly: that certain individuals needed to be banned bc if not then other instances were going to want to defederate from them, even if only at an individual user level.
However, they refused to do so: the individual users refused to hold themselves back, and then community mods refused to censor them, and then instance admins refused to ban them, and therefore other instances had to defederate from the entire instance as a result. It's like Russia or China irl not curtailing its own leader, thereby inflicting their ills upon the other nations of the world, near and far. Such authoritarian and nonconsensual behaviors need to be stopped, and perhaps will be eventually, but the longer it is allowed to flourish the greater number of innocents will get caught up in the drama first. i.e., it is perhaps the entire Fediverse that will suffer if content creators choose not to come here bc we are too extremist/leftist, bc we won't curtail our most excessive members - again they won't do it themselves, but also nobody else will either. i.e. it's not enough simply to block things on a personal level, if we want to entice more normal people (even those who don't use Linux!!?:-D) to join the Fediverse.
That's a good point, and I'll consider that.