this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
47 points (83.1% liked)
Fediverse
17840 readers
20 users here now
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
Getting started on Fediverse;
- What is the fediverse?
- Fediverse Platforms
- How to run your own community
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Clarification, because people keep misunderstanding my point: What I'm advocating for is replacing most defederation with some sort of "soft defederation" in which instance admins can select domains which are blocked by default for the users, but which they can unblock afterwards if they want to.
That wouldn't work. I find it strange that some users keep thinking moderation or defederation is somehow about them or to keep them from accessing things. Talk about self-centered to an extreme degree ๐
Defederation is primarily used to keep bad stuff away from an instance and its (volunteer) moderators. Either because it is illegal or because it causes loads of moderation workload in the communities hosted by an instance. Neither of which would your proposal of soft-defederation solve even a single bit.
Well I said that illegal content should still be defederated. And I don't think soft defederated content has to be moderated, since it's only a number of users who choose to see it.
Just because few people can see it in the home instance doesn't mean it isn't there. And when a community is viewed from remote instances that have a different soft-defederation list all the bad stuff will be publicly visible (and indexed via search engines).
So for example a feminist community would be full of incel posts that are publicly visible almost everywhere.
Okay, that's entirely fair. I was mostly thinking about the microblogging side of the Fediverse and didn't quite consider the complexity that it would add to community moderation. I guess better moderation mechanisms could probably account for that, but Lemmy is as of now far away from that.
Edit: One might also solve that by not allowing soft defederated users to post in local communities.
You got that completely backwards.
You as a user are a guest of something akin to a private house party and are expected to behave as such. In turn the instance tries to be a welcoming party host by providing an enjoyable place for you to talk with other guests.
Moderation in that case is about removing guest that don't know how to behave and choose to shit on the carpet. Defederation is about turning away known to be bad guests at the entrance so that the volunteers inside don't have to clean shit off the carpets all the time.
Its a private party, not a service to anyone. The host does it because they enjoy having a party with their friends and other people that know how to behave.
And no, federated users are no different from local users. What matters is the server location of the community.
If you host your own instance you are free to invite who ever you choose to your own parties ๐คทโโ๏ธ
What ethics? Anyone is free to open an account elsewhere.
And its not about locking anyone in, but why should I as an instance host pay for the drinks of someone that takes them to another party with horrible people that constantly try to crash parties over at my place?
I don't mind doing that with nice people's parties as I want to go over to their parties sometimes as well.
But if they really want to hang out with these horrible party crashers, they can move over there or make their own party and invite them.
I think you need to be more specific in what you mean by that. I don't think anything in the metaphors that I just wrote is unethical.
Corporate social media is unethical because they spy on you and sell your personal data to advertisers. In addition one could argue they are also unethical because they optimize their algorithms to psychologically manipulate you with the goal of stealing your time and attention so that they can show you more advertisements.
For 99% of the users, defederation is a complete non-issue and doesn't effect the choice of an instance at all.
IMHO the only people that are complaining about it are either doing it in bad faith or have been somehow gaslit into believing it is an issue by others that did so in bad faith.
Yes a lot of FOMO and people gaslit into believing it is an issue. But if you look at the main feed of Lemm.ee and compare it with pretty much any larger normal instance other than Beehaw, the content is almost the same (minus some low effort shit posts from Hexbear no-one is going to miss).