Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?
People don’t dislike defederation because they misunderstand it. They dislike it because it’s a bad user experience. It sucks to effectively get banned from a bunch of major communities through no fault of your own. It’s a flawed system. I don’t know what a good solution would be, but it’s definitely an issue.
I’m torn on defederation. In theory I like it; a user can join an instance that moderates to the level that they agree with. Beehaw is a pretty good example of this because a lot of users like having a slightly more restrictive community in order to maintain a certain vibe.
But there is a more pragmatic side of me that thinks that the average user isn’t super informed about this stuff, and are naturally going to gravitate to the larger instances. No doubt there were more trolls coming from lemmy.world, but there are far more regular users that have no idea what’s going on.
I think Beehaw’s decision is understandable though, especially given the lack of moderation tools. They’ve already mentioned that they are willing to (re?)federate in the future when trolls/bots are easier to deal with.
I think that this can easily be mitigated by the addition of transferable user profiles. Because the easier it is to hop off of a server and move to another, the better. You lose those communities in the event of a split, but then you desire new ones on your new instance and go join them. It would heal the UX much faster.
Like other users, I expect this will largely become a rarer and rarer occurrence as moderation levels out. We’re very early in the game still.
One thing I haven’t seen talked about is the benefit of this defederation. When beehaw defederated, what happened immediately? A lot of noise was made. The mods got in contact and opened dialog. Communities desired federation. While that’s interpreted as entitlement, I think it’s possible beneficial to keep the number of defederation events low and only done when necessary.
Yep. I have accounts on three instances, but I had been using my Lemmy.World one the most, and then suddenly my beehaw communities are gone. It’s not a huge deal given that these accounts are so young, but it was still annoying. These sorts of things will prevent Lemmy from growing as an overall community.
Brand new to lemmy, but this is my take as well. The first account I created was on lemmy.world and then I had to create another to come here. Imagine if Verizon ‘defederated’ from T-Mobile because of a few bad actors.
The problems are real, but the solutions Lemmy currently seems to offer are going to stifle it’s growth before it can truly go big. I can deal with it, but as it currently stands I could never get my friends to join and even if they did, a defederation event happening would kill the concept dead for my more casual friends.
happens with email servers all the time
People have been conditioned to never answer their phones when an unknown number calls because of a few bad actors that severely abuse the system and none of the network operators want to take responsibility for the actions of their users (and they are profiting from this lack of moderation).
Imagine if ISPs and services like Cloudflare didn’t counter DDoS attacks.
I think it is fair to also consider the excessive centralized moderation like the kind we criticize on reddit to be a part of the user experience. Those similar problems that only affect specific instances, but not all, is a part of the user experience here with lemmy.
To be fair, email works the same way and there are a number of domains that different email server admins block to avoid spam or for any reason they choose. I know some smaller ones block gmail and others because the gigantic amount of spam they send. I also recall the relatively quaint days of Ukraine drama in 2014 had motivated a local university to block my email because my web/email host was located in Ukraine.
Sure, there are times when individual server admins will muck things up, but rarely does my email not make it to where I want it to go. My point is that I think that this is being made into a bigger issue than it is.