Oh, boy. Back to the old Reddit patterns. How long before they start using bots to preemptively ban anyone who has ever posted on certain communities regardless of context as a time saving measure, because that was a thing on Reddit as well?
Any idea which subs are banning like that already?
and suggestions that ‘any instance is fine’, although true in a technical sense - is a little misleading
I’d say more than a little. I always suggest they look at the instance rules and also who the instance blocks to make sure they’re OK following those rules and being blocked from that content before picking. Part of why I picked SDF was that they block no other servers.
I think the blurring of the lines between developers of the Lemmy open source project, and admins of the lemmy.ml instance is a self-sabotaging and tone-deaf reflection on the site, and hurts chances of wider adoption.
Why? They explicitly haven’t baked any of their moderation/administration preferences into the code and have rejected suggestions that they should bake things along those lines into the code. If they decide to, that sounds like an awfully good reason for a fork. You don’t have to love the devs and their politics to use the software they developed, though you should probably be on board if you want to use the instance that they run.
The easiest way to explain it is to compare it to email.
You know how you might have a gmail address, your friend might have a protonmail address and your parents might still have their old aol email address? But you can all still freely talk to each other anyways?
Lemmy is like doing that, but for something like Reddit. If you notice, usernames have an @servername on the end and just like an email address that’s the server that person is connecting through. For example, I’m [email protected].
Which means I log in to lemmy.sdf.org and use their servers to read Lemmy, but I can read, post and comment on communities on any other Lemmy server that is federated with lemmy.sdf.org just like they’re on lemmy.sdf.org just like you can send an email to someone using a different email service and it makes no difference on your end.
Communities work the same way - so for example [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] are all different communities hosted on different servers with their own separate posts, subscribers, mods etc. And users on any Lemmy server federated with the server that community is on can read, comment, post, etc (mod action notwithstanding).
This federation thing I keep mentioning is just which servers are willing to talk to which other servers - again you can compare to email. Sometimes email servers pop up to send massive amounts of spam, and when they do mail providers blacklist them and simply ignore all messages from that source. Defederating is the same idea. You use lemmy.world according to your username, so if lemmy.world defederates lemmy.ml then you will no longer be able to see any communities @lemmy.ml or read any posts or comments posted by someone @lemmy.ml - to you it will be like lemmy.ml just doesn’t exist.
If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see a link labeled “Instances”, which will give you a list of which servers lemmy.world talks to and which ones they’ve specifically blocked. Lemmy.world has a pretty long list of blocked instances.
One of the reasons I picked SDF’s lemmy instance was because they don’t block **any **instances - as far as SDF is concerned it’s up to the end user what they want to see. Also SDF is kinda a cool entity - they’re a non-profit best known for maintaining public access unix servers and a bunch of retrocomputing stuff (like dial up internet and a gopher server) that has been around since 1987 (the name is literally an old anime reference because they started out as an anime BBS).
I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.
This is essentially the same problem Reddit has (mods/admins can control what is discussed on their boards), stems from the same place (mods/admins have essentially unlimited power over their boards/instances), and has the same basic solution - let the echo chamber echo chamber and create alternative communities that don’t have that problem. And on the upside, since this is a federated space you can just have [email protected] instead of r/truewhatever7alpha.
It’s just more noticeable here because the censorious leftward fringe is both more extreme and more aggressive about it.
At least we haven’t started getting mods running bots to auto-ban anyone who has ever interacted with other specific communities yet.
Really no different than Reddit in that regard. At least we don’t have people automatically banning you for having ever interacted with specific other communities yet, at least I don’t think we do yet.
EDIT: Shit, somehow I forgot the don’t. Teach me not to proofread.
‘biased monopoly’ what are you talking about, everything is sourced and open
The heart of narrative control on Wikipedia is controlling what standards of evidence need to be met and what sources are acceptable. An easy example of this would be the argument over adding an entry for Thomas James Ball to the List of Political Self-Immolations. Before they finally gave in and accepted it, there was a push to establish a standard for entries on the list that almost no existing entry on the list met and apply that standard to determine if Thomas James Ball should be included, while painting it as though the process were neutral.
So, companies will create Threads accounts and use them to post ads as regular Threads posts, then? Because that’s what the block button is for.
There’s also nothing that stops any company from doing exactly this in any instance that currently exists, including spinning up their own instance.
If we’re talking ads that Threads will be inserting into the feeds on their site, what does it matter? Either they are a user making a regular post treated like any other user or they are something that Threads can only push on their own site.
but it will be a sanitised corporate safe space for advertisers
Posts on threads might be, but they can’t force their standards onto posts or users on other servers. That’s kinda the point of federation.
So, posts from Threads users will have to meet Threads “safe space” rules (because they are Threads users and Threads can require whatever it wants of them), but this means nothing for your posts on any other server. Worst case, Threads blocks you from visibility on Threads.
and ads sprinkled throughout.
Threads has no power to push their ads onto any federated server. They can show whatever ads they want on Threads, but those ads don’t appear to anyone else and likewise they couldn’t do anything to artificially make their content show up higher on any other server.
Alright, fair enough, but why would anyone allow meta even an inch of space into a ‘free’ platform?
It’s an open protocol, they can join if they want. That’s kinda the point of being an open protocol, anyone willing to implement it just can.
I imagine that if tomorrow Meta decides to run a free email service ala Hotmail or Gmail you’d be demanding that they will destroy email everywhere if they aren’t put on every black hole list immediately?
threatening to harvest our conversations without our fucking permission,
Public posts on social media are well public. There’s literally nothing that stops them from reading your posts without federation, and federation does very little to change that in a meaningful way.
or using Microsoft’s tactic of “embrace and extend” to destroy the competition
By what, adding features to Threads that make users prefer it over other ActivityPub implementations? The worst case here is that Meta federates, then does something that breaks federation and their users don’t jump ship to another instance but stick with the Meta product?
Anyone can implement ActivityPub. We have no problem with that.
So long as they aren’t a giant corp you personally see as especially evil, then if they implement ActivityPub they need to be blocked as globally as possible?
I find it bizarre you think the mere possibility of users from a big corporate service being able to communicate with the fediverse is akin to wolves attacking sheep.
If you really need your echo chamber to be free of people who use Meta servers, you could just block them as a user without mandating everyone else do so too.
That’s a terrible analogy. That’s like saying that Google running an email service ruined your email and the only solution is for everyone to block all emails from accounts hosted by Google.
Threads federation doesn’t change anything about the rest of Lemmy or Mastodon.
The absolute worst case is that it brings a ton more users into the fold, eternal September style.
Hypothetically it does, they just don’t block any instances, so it’s empty. They are unlikely to start outside of extreme circumstances.
Likewise for their Mastodon instance, which has been around for a long while.
Reddit’s policy has always been that subreddit requests only apply if someone actually goes vacant.
Q: If the current top mod for, say, a default sub had decided to just delete the sub in protest over the API changes what are the odds Reddit would have left it dead and waited for someone to request the name for an entirely new from scratch sub to be started as opposed to undoing the deletion and handing ownership to the next mod in line (if they were willing to take it)?
Yes (just checked out of curiosity). And Burggit, and Lemmygrad, and Exploding-Heads and virtually everyone else. They don’t block other instances, as far as I can tell.
According to their instances list, they do not block anyone, and according to the other search thingy they are only blocked by 7 instances, all private Mastodon instances.
The Chapo mods wanted to follow site-wide rules but reddit refused to explain what was in violation of them.
And here I thought it was all the brigading and the calls for violence. Admittedly mostly violence against police, though not exclusively.
Reddit didn’t do anything about this. In fact The Red Pill still exists.
TRP generally doesn’t brigade, and doesn’t engage in calls for violence. It’s a shitty view of the world for sure, but they dont at least do those two things, they mostly grouse about shitty and unreasonable they think women are.
But then when the subreddit owner closed KotakuInAction, suddenly reddit doesn’t mind interfering with the free market of ideas.
KiA has heavy handed mods that are basically the only reason the sub continues to exist, and an outright ban on certain topics they expect to cause contention. When the original sub owner killed it, the next willing mod down the line asked for it back and it was given to them. That’s not radically different from what happens with other abandoned subs, except that usually they are actually abandoned and there has to be more talk about who should take over.
You can always choose what you subscribe to and use the subscribed feed, or alternately just block communities that offend you as you encounter them, depending on how tightly curated an experience you want to have. I honestly feel like the only thing that needs is the ability to use wildcards in blocked community names to let you block a bunch of related communities quickly.
There is a stormfront subreddit, but it’s a different thing entirely. Someone snapped up the sub name and made a sub about severe weather, specifically to snub their noses at Stormfront the neo-Nazi group.
Not as much fun as the worldnews and anime_titties subreddits.
or find an instance that is run by an admin with the same mindset as you might have.
I found one that apparently does for me, but then that mindset is “let me see everything, and leave what I want to view up to me”.
Only insofar as some instances block communication from some other instances. Not mine though, that’s actually one of the reasons I picked it. That and it being by an org that’s older than the web and runs a public unix server and a bunch of retrocomputing type services as well as fediverse stuff. They started out as a dialup anime BBS.