Count Regal Inkwell

Personally, I feel like you can have fun on fedi, but it all depends on the accounts/communities you follow. My Sharkey feed AND my Lemmy feed are both full of memes, fandom nonsense, and shitposts. If you only follow serious communities and people that talk about serious news, you’ll have a serious time.

That said, one thing that I thought was unpleasant about the fediverse, and then realised was a feature rather than a bug is… The fact that you can run out of fediverse content. After 2 hours on Lemmy, I have functionally read all of Lemmy (or, well, all the communities I care to read), and maybe 1 more hour to join conversations I’d like to join.

Compared to the seemingly infinite content stream of The Other Sites ™, this initially struck me as bad and weird, but then I realised… I actually prefer it this way. Doomscrolling a fedi site/app is actually not possible, and that has done wonders for my mental health.

“No! I refuse to open more than one site! If it’s not on this one site that I have decided amounts to the entire threadiverse then it doesn’t exist, how dare people make me think? The absurdity of it all!”

Removed by mod

The problem with this is that it isn’t really decentralized equally. Lemmy.world has most of the users and getting defederated from them is essentially a death sentence in terms of content and engagement.

Self-resolving issue here. If people hop away from LW due to LW making decisions they don’t like, LW will cease being the one-go-to-place for stuff. Which is good, it shouldn’t be. No one instance should be “the main instance”. The right way to use federation is each person & community should make their home at a place where they vibe just right with the fed admins. It’s even good for LW itself as it reduces the burden on its server and the workload for its admins.

Also also – Defederation is a far more nuanced thing than just “is block”. There is more than one tool that can be used by an ActivityPub admin.

If LW defederates from your home instance – You can still manually follow communities that are in LW AND interact with them (unless the admins go out of their way to ALSO block USERS from your home instance), as “defederated from the instance” just removes it from the global timeline/global community search.

What happened here, though, wasn’t defederation, it was a block, and a block on two specific communities, which outright prevents viewing & interacting with content from those communities from within LW. Which brings me to: LW’s block on the piracy communities from dbzer0 doesn’t stop LW users from interacting with dbzer0 as a whole. Or vice-versa. Only with stuff from the piracy coms.

Yeah like.

This isn’t reddit dot com opaquely purging your favourite subreddit for some unspecific corporate reason.

The admins stated quite clearly why they are blocking it (“we don’t want trouble, and our TOS lay out that we’ll defed from illegal shit for our own safety”), and it is their instance. And unlike Reddit – The community is still THERE in its home server. It has not been burninated. – You can just. Make an account elsewhere. It’s free. It takes less than 5 minutes. You can even KEEP your LW account for other communities.

Centralized Reddit brain poison tbh.

Your password manager will keep track of your credentials. If you have THAT MUCH trouble keeping track of which communities are on which server, stick to local communities.

Back in the day we had everything be its own separate forum and no one died from that. You’re just lazy.

Yeah that. And I say it as someone who, on a good day, will go on philosophical rambles about how piracy is in fact the moral thing to do.

Do people just not get that this is the entire point of a decentralized system?

Hop accounts, you lil’ bitch. Don’t sit in one server complaining about the owner of that server when you have a billion options.

And if your priority is the piracy community? Make the server that hosts that your homeserver.

Or just have more than one account and use an app instead of the default webpage.

It’s not rocket science. People’s brains are poisoned by centralization. Back in my day everything was its own separate forum with its own separate account and to be honest, it was miles better like that.

Yes but also a lot of fediverse instances autoblock small one person servers because of how often they are used by spammers and harrassers

Define “real mail”.

Will my usual accounts (GMail and Yahoo, I am still stuck in absolutely-proprietary land when it comes to e-mail) work? :P

This is relevant to my interests.