Heya, with recent news of beehaw.org defederating from a few instances, I noticed that we also recently defederated from sh.itjust.works. I'm not in-tune with whether they deserve it or not, but I have noticed that it does have some impacts on our users.
I happened to see this post from a fellow furry, expressing frustration with picking the 'wrong' server. They can also no longer see pawb.social posts/communities.
I also recently posted my little heart script over there because they had a general scripts community, and I've only just noticed that the edits/updates I've been doing on that post are not actually going anywhere - it's similar to being shadowbanned. The pawb.social version of that post gets updated as normal, but we never sync that version to their server (and subsequently no other server ever gets the updated version). This makes sense now that I know we're defederated, but nowhere in the UI does it indicate that I'm just shouting into the void. As a side effect, I'm no longer able to keep tabs on that scripting community for tool updates.
- Pawb version: https://pawb.social/post/43513
- sh.itjust.works version: https://sh.itjust.works/post/89693
I suspect that this is a big problem right now because people are migrating and joining servers at random, and they don't know that the server they're joining has bad admins. Communities are rapidly getting created, growing, then getting shadowbanned by half the lemmyverse.
I'm not petitioning for anything to change at pawb.social at the moment, and I'm sure that there were good reasons to defederate sh.itjust.works, but it does make me a bit wary that eventually I too might feel like I picked the 'wrong' server if a defederation culture becomes common in the lemmyverse. It's not something I thought I had to think about when making an account. I really doubt anyone reputable will ever defederate us, so it's really just a matter of who we choose to defederate.
Thoughts?
I must say, I do have to agree that care must be taken with defederating. While I certainly understand doing so from instances which are highly toxic, or those that are actively engaging in spamming. Banning very large instances, like SIJW, could start to cause a lot of issues as more communities move over from Reddit. Here's a list I found on Reddit of some communities that have established themselves (I don't know of it's in an official manner or not, but not sure it 100% matters in this case) on Lemmy apparently. Many are on lemmy.ml, but others are on different instances too, such as lemmy.world. That's definitely going to be a problem soon if we defederated from omw of those.
I support defederating from actively troublesome instances, but only in a reactive way. Proactively defederating could lead to more issues than it solves. Unless we actively had issues from SIJW, I don't see a reason to defederate from them? (It would help of we could just block certain communities from instances, instead of having to defederate entirely)
Here's what happens when you defederate the entire internet, you'll be back on Reddit and users will be asking you "hey man why can't I talk to XYZ". This is literally what has happened to dozens of Mastodon instances already.
There are a lot of people on this ActivityPub thing who will block you for using the wrong software stack, block you because some old passed around list also had some domains that haven't been online in years, and the best part is they will never ask you before doing so. There's no way around this, other than running monolithic websites such as rdrama.net (which only work for one community).
True, fedi is a broken pos that doesn’t work because 99% of the admins are mentally ill.
They're literally speedrunning it on lemmy instances too, because on Reddit so many admins were used to "block everyone".
oh shit that reminds me when some dramanauts tried to proselytize redditors they threw a fit over how ugly arrrdrama is and claimed it was just a lemmy instance lmao and because the git commits have slurs in them they refuse to copy the code lmao. The NIGGER license does really work to ward off vampires.
I saw, it’s crazy lol, what’s even the point of using fedi if you block every other lemmy instance? Not surprised tho obv, redditors have this reputation for a reason.
Thats why Im not super optimistic that fedi is the perfect free speech alterative to twitter. Atleast on twitter you could shit out alts for trolling but here you end up with everyone defederated into micro communities on an admins whim.