Feddit UK

Same as you, I can neither agree nor disagree with this, and it is of course their choice who they federate with -- that's part of the point of this thing, you can choose who to federate with. It is really interesting to see how lemmy develops and how communities use it to handcraft the sort of online space they want.

It does seem like their immediate goals would be better served with a forum, but I also see why a platform-agnositic approach using ActivityPub and federation makes sense for them over the long run, as there are surely plenty of users on Mastodon for example that they would want to interact with and incude in the safe space they're creating.

The learning for me I think is that when I reply to posts on other instances that are federated onto our instance, I should be mindful of that instance, its culture and its rules. I'm walking into a room and talking to people in that room, so I should read the room first. Again, it will be interesting to see how the culture on lemmy plays out, and whether "reading the room" becomes a core part of how people use federated software.

@clara @theory

After reading some of the "essays" they have on the about the community it seems they want there own site/community. Maybe a forum/reddit/discord server would suit what they want better than a federated place.

To me it seems they just looked for somewhere they could achieve what they wanted (ie reddit copy) but not understood the federated part of the tech.

But it is absolutely true that telephone networks and email servers that get used too much for spam calls/messages will get blacklisted by other providers.

If your email provider gets a bad reputation then your emails will get blocked (that is a lot of how spam filtering works). That is pretty analogous.

Well that instance will lose out to others, give it time and those communities will be created elsewhere and people looking for a larger pool of content will sign up on a federated instance.

For the other side of the argument, safe spaces, well moderated can be important so private communities need to be added to Lemmy with some haste.

Consider the kbin tech magazine instead, i think

It's going to be interesting how this plays out. I also see where they are coming from, but severing people from a community in either direction will cause upset.

Lemmy and Lemmy like services are not the same as Mastodon like services. It's the 'then' vs the 'now'. It doesn't matter so much if my Mastodon history and reputation is severed because the focus is on 'now'. Lemmy on the other hand relies on the history of each community.

Edit: I do see this from another perspective as well... there are a huge number of communities being started (I presume this is people trying to either recreate Reddit or to land-grab similarly named communities) but not a huge amount of content being posted.

They've defederated from a Iot of common badfaith instances on the fediverse, lot of pleroma and masto troll/fash instances - which is normaI for admins on the fediverse. Its active protection of your users from harrassment. Most mastodon instances have 200-400+ instances blocked and defederated. Its standard.

Lemmy admins may be new to the fediverse, but once the troll instances start to realise how easy it is to mess with you from the safety of their instances, you're going to need your admins to start communicating with the long term masto admins, get their blocklists and recognise how they keep their users safe proactively rather than retroactively.

Defederation is one of the strongest defenses the federation has in terms of maintaining stability within its wider network and enforcing that admins/mods do their jobs. Its a matter of everyone seeing eye to eye and agreeing on ground rules for civility and agreeing they're going to moderate to a decent active standard and keep control of their users. If an instance is unable to keep control of its house, or the admin goes AWOL and ends up with tons of bad faith users running amok flinging poop everywhere, then yeah they will get defederated. It can always be fixed later on with serious discussion and commitments made between the admins of instances.

But yeah every instance on the fediverse that doesnt want underage porn / nazi imagery / fascist agitators / gore / hatespeech etc getting posted continually to their users, is going to have to defederate a couple of hundred instances. The Fediverse is a lot bigger than Lemmy, and people outside of Lemmy/Kbin can all post to your instances and your threads, or even start our own threads.

See for yourself https://beehaw.org/instances

It means they wont see anything new (post, comment, message) from the instances they defederated, and vice versa, and neither will be able to subscribe to (or even see) communities on each other