sh.itjust.works Main Community

:(

I don't think that users on a fledgling platform should be this gung-ho about fragmentation, but it is what it is. Lemmy is starting to feel like something I should just revisit in a year: either to postmortem another perennially niche service, or to finally "pick a side" once the chips are more settled, even though I don't particularly want to.

This issue has been resolved.

The trouble with having a federated server containing a lot of users/communities promoting bigotry is that it dirties the name of Lemmy. The dirtying dissuades people from joining. It ultimately helps ONLY the group causing the dirtying and harms the majority.

The most important thing people have on Fediverse is freedom of choice and, I hope, of expression. There are countless isolated communities outside of it, corporate or not, which one can use as a safe space when necessary. I really hope this decentralized archipelago will not turn into a) centralized echo chamber, or b) even more decentralized set of very small echo chambers. We need to be able to experience everything that there is, and react to it if/however we like. And for that, we need substantial amount of communities to be federated to everyone else. I hate when some delusional freak praises Mao or Stalin, who literally washed the land with the blood of the innocent and built a new order on their bones. Or when someone writes a trolling(?) post which implies open racism. But I better be able to read those posts than not.

While I blocked the community, I don't want my little community blocked because the whole instance is defederated. Should that happen I will leave - an advantage of federation.

Edit: I also blocked the 2 posters. There were only 2.

I didn't know about it until I checked Beehaw. It's easy enough to block the community so I can't see it, but I would rather it not be here. TheDonald and The Agora feel like polar opposite ideals.

Defederation is a double-edged sword. In the end, those who defederate will lock themselves into a smaller space and lose out on content produced by users outside of their instance. With how hard it currently is to discover content, a big instance defederating from lots of other instances with little good reason can easily backfire. At least that's how I see it from what I currently understand about Lemmy.

I think people are trying to defederate to filter content, which is not something that defederating is good for right now, cause every big instance has a lot of diverse communities. Also, there's been concerns about bots and safety which makes sense, but that doesn't mean that we're under risk of staying defederated permanently or for any significant amount of time. Moderation tools, content filtering and discovery needs to become much better before that resolved for everyone in a satisfying way.

As for /c/thedonald and communities like it specifically, it's ridiculous to take what seems to me as satire as 100% serious straight up bigotry, but I do understand that we've seen communities with origins in satire turn to serious on the internet before. I think an instance-wide flag for communities that signals that the content is satire when you open them or see a post from them. Allow communities to be created with it from the start but only modifiable by admins afterwards, so you can't take it away or add it after a community is made. It might just work to mitigate this problem and help punish rule breaking quicker and easier.

Dang... I just signed up and picked that instance since it's powered by renewables and the agora exists. I'll give it a minute to see how things go, but looks like I should switch to another instance.