- No server operator needs to federate with you.
- No server operator needs to tolerate things they don’t want on their instance.
- No user of an instance needs to personally curate their own extensive never ending blocklist of users and channels they don’t want to see.
Quit your pseudo-intellectual whining and choose what instance(s) work for you. If you think regularly interacting with shit content somehow helps you stay out of an echo chamber then go ahead and make a second account on those garbage instances full of hateful people. Then you can read both the decent servers and the trash ones and be the fedora wearing ackshually right fair and balanced uber nerd you always wanted to be.
Edit: The huge number of upvotes on this post compared to the low numbers on the whiney imposers’ posts is proof of exactly where this community places its priorities.
Whinging about whinging. The spirit of Reddit lives on.
“The Spirit of Reddit”
Nailed it.
What the hell is up with the right thumb?
AI is going on.
Yeah looks kinda eerie…or is that…eary
That’s fucking hideous, thank you.
Thank you, I absolutely hate it. I’m going to go vomit into my own eyes now.
IDK that feels more discord mod esque to me xD
Congratulations
What is that?
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We’re already at peak reddit replacement if we have whining in the comments about the contents of another post whining about users. I feel so at home here.
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😂
According to some of the posts in here, apparently, wanting to ban Nazis from your instance and refusing to rebroadcast their toxic shit is being “entitled”…
This makes the Nazis sound like a bunch of Karen’s lol
I would definitely expect the Venn diagram of neo-nazis and Karens who give trouble to retail workers to look a lot like a circle.
Sometimes it’s a circle, sometimes it’s a Mickey Mouse hat on Ron DeSantis’ head.
Nothing wrong with feeling entitled to tell nazis to fuck off.
Completely agree, this whole entitled attitude about “we left reddit because censoreship hurr durr, now u do same thing, you have to do what we tell you” is really annoying…
Nobody is censoring you, you are free to join and visit whatever instances you want and watch their content… You can even host your own instance where you federate with whoever you want, you have free access to the code… But nobody is forced to host ANY content they don’t want on the server THEY themselves pay for…
we left reddit because censoreship hurr durr
The people leaving Reddit because of censorship did so long ago. These dissatisfied/censored people have a new home anyway… They can view child porn, people being brutally tortured/murdered, and make all the threats of violence they want on Twitter now. They just have to be careful not to insult the, “free speech absolutist” dictator or he’ll have them banned.
The mass migration today is because of dissatisfaction with Reddit’s decision to end 3rd party apps and specifically, the way in which they handled it. The dishonesty, the heavy-handed dictator-like seizure of protesting communities, the complete disregard for accessibility/moderation tools, etc.
To claim that people are leaving Reddit “because of censorship” isn’t just missing the point, it’s flat out wrong.
They went to the cesspit voat and that went under like a turd. I wonder where they all went after that, probably back to Reddit or Discord.
I wonder where they all went after that
Gab is still around and I think there are a lot of private discord communities as well.
Lemmy is the first Reddit alternative most recent refugees have tried out, but it is clear that many existing Lemmy users do not want their platform to grow.
There needs to be some clear guidance on this for newbies. As it is, you have to stumble across scraps of random discussions to learn about defederation and partial federation politics. You generally do this after you e already spent time on an account. Seriously, how is a person supposed to know what instance to choose up front?
The people screaming about free speech for bigots & fascists seem to neglect the free speech of the instance owners and admins.
They’re doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. Paying for bandwidth and servers. Donating their time to create the software, work out the kinks, and moderate the communities so we don’t strangle each other.
From their perspective: Would you want to use your money and time to rebroadcast Nazism or similarly toxic ideology? Because that’s what they’re being asked, and most of them say “HELL NO!” When the chuds are demanding that these people rebroadcast such crap, it’s like they’re asking these admins to do a Hitler salute with them.
This is their space. They have free speech rights too. That’s what curation is, free speech. You send a message by the choice of messages you rebroadcast or refuse to rebroadcast.
That can be used by any authoritarian claiming to be the greatest good.
It’s great to bully and censor but inevitably ends in subjugation.
That’s the types that want this end up in very small circles or simply agreeing with whatever authority sells.
As long as you have clear boundaries as to what’s acceptable or not, a population with critical thinking skills will always be able to tell what’s going on.
I had this debate with a friend a while back. He said we should tolerate nazi flags because “what if the government decides the pride flag is a hateful flag”. Well, the nazi flag (at least coloquially) stands for “Kill all jews”, while the pride flag stands for “Be proud of your sexual orientation and gender identity”. One of these passes the hate speech/incitement test, the other doesn’t.
There just needs to be consistent and well thought out rules in place. If it’s the case, I’m not scared of authoritarians using the paradox of tolerance to their advantage because it’s so transparent.
The people screaming about free speech for bigots & fascists seem to neglect the free speech of the instance owners and admins.
This is a pretty farcical argument, because the instance admins set things up specifically so that the instance users can discuss and vote on what the instance does.
That’s what curation is, free speech.
What in the everloving hell is this awful take. No, curation is not free speech. Nor does it need to be.
Content moderation absolutely is a form of free speech. They get to decide who to associate with and what ideals to rebroadcast with their own equipment. They aren’t government entities and do reserve the right to express their individual beliefs. If you have a problem with that, find a better-suited instance for your own personal beliefs, or host your own.
If you want further reading on the subject, here’s a well-written post that explains the positive relationship between more active content moderation and “freer” speech.
Amazing.
“I’m censoring people so that I can promote free speech!”
Just admit that it’s not free speech. That’s just a roundabout way to justify your decision when there’s no justification required.
Edit: Cracks had Agora on the brain and applied it where it wasn’t necessary.
I think you have issues with reading comprehension. I haven’t bitched anywhere about any defederation, moderation, censorship or whatever done by instance owners.
Obviously, it’s up to them and can lead to better content. It can also lead to echo chambers, but that’s an implementation detail.
All I did was point out that censorship is not free speech. Free speech is an ideal that doesn’t work in the real world, and it’s fine to admit you’re not open to everyone having free speech.
Edit: You know what? You’re right - this was a poor response to your comment. I blame too much Agora and too little coffee. Will come back to this if I think of a better response more in line with the level you’re addressing (more general and philosophical sense).
I do think curation is not necessarily censorship, and is itself a form of free expression when looking at all means a person can express themselves in a given society. [End of edit, slightly less but still kinda dumb comments remain below]
I apologize - this was more of a general statement. “You’re free to build, or you’re free to complain, both are valid”. *Edit: And taking the recent hub-bub as a case in point re: the Fediverse stuff. Bleh, been a bit too meta recently.
My issue was with curation not being free expression. This only holds for me if there are absolutely no other alternatives to express your ideas.
Last time I read this it was musk on Twitter, days before censoring electoral messages in Turkey
cool story bro, why do you think it’s relevant?
If I own a wall and allow people to post signs on it, I can choose to remove whatever signs I deem inappropriate. The creator can put their signs up somewhere else and I’m under no obligation to use my property to broadcast their message if I choose not to.
Nothing stops you from using your own resources to broadcast your message. Be the change you want to see in the world.
So you’re saying I shouldn’t be able to choose who to allow onto my server?
Not sure how you got to that answer. Censorship isn’t free speech.
No one has to support free speech. Just own it instead of making up rubbish like “I’m actually censoring to promote free speech”
Would you consider it acceptable for an instance owner to ban advertisements?
An instance owner can do whatever they want for their own instance.
Calling censorship free speech to make yourself feel better doesn’t make it true though.
asks people to quit whining
whines
Anyway, I don’t really care about defederation enough to switch instances. But even if I did, you can’t deny that it’s annoying. When Lemmy introduces some nice way of migrating to other instances with userdata intact, then your rant will make sense. Without that, I don’t think it’s wrong if people complain.
Most people complaining have two weeks of user data…
And during those 2 weeks I made 500 comments and almost 400 posts. Not picking sides, just saying that I’m tied to my instance now at this point.
You are single handedly keeping the entirety of lemmy alive
I’m not tied to my instance I AM MY INSTANCE
Lol sameish. I don’t have that much of an attachment to my past though. Jump around, see it all, share stuff, delete account and repeat. Your friends will know where to find you.
I’d like to point out that most people on both sides of the defederation debate are like that. And this instance has been up for months with only LemmyGrad blocked
Two weeks.
New instance added to the block mix 👌 pumping up those numbers.
Reminder that defederation is an explicit feature implemented into fediverse platforms. It is meant to be used as the instance sees fit. The notion that you can never defederate with anyone defeats the purpose of the fediverse, we might as well make one huge centralized platform in that case.
No other instance owes you a federation to your instance. The fediverse’s whole philosophy is that instances get to configure both who they federate with and who federates with them.
Finally, there is a certain irony in the people screaming “freedom” and “free speech” telling admins of private instances what they can and can’t do with their own platform.
I agree in principle but if it ends up with defederation-by-default, or something similarly restrictive, you’ll kill the whole point of the federation and we can just go back to Reddit. IMO it should be used very sparingly (mostly to combat full on spam kinda like with email) and largely let the users themselves decide.
OP rants about seeing garbage from garbage instances but if you actually subscribe to the communities you want, you’ll only see comments from those “garbage instances”, and there can still be decent people with interesting viewpoints on there.
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That’s all true. I do also think that there needs to be a certain amount of built-in stability in order for federated communities to grow. People are less likely to stick around if there is a high risk that their favorite communities becomes fractured into isolated instances.
If that was the argument presented I doubt there would be any argument to begin with. Saying ‘hey, you might not want to break connections with site for no reason so your users aren’t surprised or worry that they…so on and so forth’ could be met with a ‘hey, thanks for the advice’ and everyone would have moved on. Accusing them of censorship and attacking someone else’s freedom of speech because you don’t think a personal decision they made was justified because other people utilizing their platform expected something else is a completely different animal.
The onus is on the user to keep track of what the instance they’re on is doing. Beehaw behaved in a manner that I don’t agree with, so I chose not to sign up there. Lemmy.world has so far defederated from instances I would also choose to defederate from. If the admins ever start defederating willy-nilly without good cause, I’ll choose another instance.
I do also think that there needs to be a certain amount of built-in stability in order for federated communities to grow.
I would argue that the Fediverse is inherently more stable than other platforms. The big platforms are defined by inconsistency. If you don’t like it, you can take your ball and go home and that’s your only choice. The Fediverse lets you take your ball anywhere you want. You don’t even need to change apps
I knew nothing about inter-Lemmy-instance-politics when I made my account. I simply made it on a server that was actually not SO overwhelmed that it couldn’t make new accounts. I would imagine the same is true of many new users of late.
My Lemmy exerience: We’re (heavily) advertised to on Reddit during the pre-blackout mess that we should try Lemmy. I go to try Lemmy. Server is broken. Server is broken. Server is not allowing new users. Server is not allowing new users. Ah! This one actually functions, so I can try Lemmy! Start following and posting, and finding nice communities. Then start finding out that some of these only federate in one direction, so I’m posting to people on another instance who can’t see it, because of Lemmy admin bickering and politics. Great, now I need to start over with a new account again, just when I was feeling settled in? Leaves a bad taste, and I was lucky enough to not end up on one of the MOST hated instances.
I hate politics. You can’t escape them anywhere involving humans.
This isn’t a corporation advertising to get your business it’s a collective movement of people working to create a better internet, I totally understand you not liking politics but the reality of this world is that politics is important - the people runnning instances are generally doing it with their own time and money simply because they believe in the importance of the project, of course these are going to be people with strong principles.
Personally I think having a complex ecosystem is going to be a great thing when it’s had time to emerge and settle but yeah for now it’s all a bit new and up in the air but that’s part of the fun
But we need guidance for users to choose an instance before they create an account. Right now, people come in blind, into a minefield of politics. It is very frustrating to walk into that mess and then get reprimanded if you mention it. There is no warning for new users.
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I wonder if people would be interested in a “lurker” instance that disables comments/posts/etc. entirely. A “read-only” instance for the people who really hate the idea of being defederated, lol.
That’s fucking brilliant, I’m going to try to make one
Yes please. I’d rather curate my own and not risk missing content because I didn’t realize that some instance admins have beef or are too trigger happy with defederating.
You are free to make your own instance to do so. You can run it on an old cell phone or your home computer.
People want to have everything in one place and they bitch and whine when everything in one place ends up getting under control of people who are shitty.
Defederating is a needed part to maintain no party keeps too much control and ruins it for everyone. Remember why most of us left reddit for here? The ability for communities to defederate others will hopefully prevent the shit that happened.
Too far in either direction is bad. If everything completely separate was so great, then there would be no need for federation at all: but actually building a community and creating areas that feel alive is tough to do that way. People don’t want to individually manage connecting to random separate servers for each community, and if you didn’t connect to the right random server maybe you never even find the community you would have contributed to in positive ways.
Getting rid of hateful stuff is good, in my opinion even though some people will muddy the waters it’s really not that hard to determine what constitutes “hateful stuff”. But there’s also going overboard. “OMG, this server allows open user signups and some random dude signed up and created an unpleasant community. DEFEDERATE THE WHOLE SERVER IMMEDIATELY! IMMEDIATELY!!!”
Maybe a better solution is to have servers publish lists of new communities but not federate them to other servers right away. Maybe they need to reach a certain age and (possibly) be subject to some sort of approval process. That will give the administrator of the server a chance to recognize and deal with the problems before it starts to spread out across the federation. Of course, if someone just lets horrible stuff fester on their server and is unresponsive then by all means it should be defederated.
Right, but there is no central authority to decide the best rules, so we get to live through the process figuring itself out. Go ahead and promote what you consider a good solution, but anyone bitching that this or that platform is inhibiting their free speech by not conforming to the process they propose is just part of the noise, not someone to be taken seriously in the discussion.
Sure. To be honest, anyone who brings up “free speech” when talking about reddit, Lemmy, whatever doesn’t really understand free speech.
The only thing I personally was complaining about there was a knee-jerk collective punishment type of approach.
That’s fair, I think the first instinct being to defederate is alow effort way of dealing with the issue. I don’t necessarily have a better one with the sudden influx of people from platforms so utterly different that is basically a while new world and a while new sleep of malicious actors following the herd, but it still should be understood that it’s up to the individual instance to react, not the people leeching off the goodwill of the people maintaining it and complaining the whole way along.
Actually defederated as it works here means one party has way more power than in centralized Reddit.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/511746
It ruins it for anyone who is not deeply in agreement with the admins.
It’s admins and groupthink over users. And zero stability or discoverability. Friction with little to gain unless you’re in authoritarian lockstep
I feel like these are just growing pains. I mean I’m sure people will argue about to defederate or not for as long as the fediverse exists, but I imagine it’ll become background noise as people get accustomed to what the fediverse is and isn’t.
The fact that this level of choice exists, both for operaters and for users is a big part what makes these places stand apart from reddit and it’s ilk.
Some of us are old enough to remember IRC networks splitting up and the Fediverse de-federation drama feels exactly the same. It is an aspect of human nature that cannot be solved with technical solutions.
It is completely normal for groups of humans to split up and segregate themselves from each other with some individuals belonging to multiple groups simultaneously. It’s how we evolved and it’s how the Fediverse (and whatever comes after) will evolve going forward.
Every instance is like a political party without exclusivity. You can belong to multiple at once. Rather than working on identity migration my opinion is that they should instead come up with a way for people to login to each other’s instances with different accounts. Just like I can login to Disqus or StackExchange with my Google account I should be able to login to Beehaw.org with my programming.dev account and vice versa.
This would be very convenient from an end-user’s perspective since they could access posts and comments on the instance where they live and links to communities could be handled in an absolute, universal format and it wouldn’t even matter (from the end user’s perspective). Because if they loaded /c/whatever on some Lemmy instance or /m/whatever on a Kbin instance they’d still be posting using their Beehaw.org account (or wherever they have an account). Links to external communities could just load those external communities and it wouldn’t need so much data to be federated between all instances (e.g. comments and votes).
In regards to moderation: Even if Beehaw.org banned my account from posts/comments that doesn’t really have any bearing on whether or not it should accept my account from a login perspective (it’s better than having banned users browsing anonymously–because then the instance owners will know they’re there). It would also allow moderators at Beehaw.org (or any other instance) to ban specific users from other instances much more easily because those users would likely stay at that other instance rather than have multiple accounts anywhere and everywhere that would also need to be banned.
I’m not sure it’s entirely just growing pains. Some of the people arguing for defederation seem to be arguing in bad faith. On the other hand, it seems like they are uniting the community against defederation, which is ultimately a good thing.
A lot of the people arguing to never defederate are the types who smell of “but who is going to read my extremist views if you all defederate my instance, I already got banned everywhere else”.
You feelin’ alright, man? Maybe get something to eat.
big “I am very badass” vibes
I don’t get that vibe at all. Seems like they’re calling out people who want toxicity to be allowed.
The fun part of the fedi is seeing the instance drama. Where before everyone would just yell at the centralized platform corporation, and now we get to yell at the people directly who are trying to filter us out! Usually for good reason.
I think these growing pains are a necessity and look forward to seeing how the platform evolves.
Yeah, I predict a long road of “drama” before enough user join and indtance operators won’t be able to play these games anymore.
Me and my popcorn are ready.
Except the user had actually more power to create a positive experience with heterogeneous content in the centralized Reddit than here.
It’s like the old saying goes… if a Nazi sits at a table and no one gets up, you have a table full of Nazis.
If you have a community full of Nazis then you have an instance full of Nazis.
Yeah except it’s more like a room full of thousands of normal people and you saw two Nazis playing with each others’ dicks in the back so you started calling the room a room full of Nazis.
Also the two “Nazis” turn out to be inept MAGA types.
Just two fat guys on mobility scooters with red hats
Two Nazis is two too many.
What do you consider a nazi?
Everyone right of mao
Seriously. And honestly, even ignoring the super hateful instances, if one server collectively wants to de-federate with another for ANY reason, it is entirely their prerogative. It’s funny how many people seem to think that other instances should be FORCED to host others’ content, all for their convenience. The level of entitlement there is off the charts.
It literally blows my mind that people seem to think otherwise. Especially since the admins hosting an instance are basically running a charity. If you don’t want to be on an instance that occasionally defederates from ones that defend hate speech, then go find a different instance, or start your own.
I have literally been downvoted in one of those posts for pointing out that defederating can not be replaced with per user instance blocking completely (as opposed to having both once per user instance blocking is implemented) because admins want to keep content that is illegal in their jurisdiction out of their instance caches.
Seriously, I’ve been here like two weeks, and I got a basic grasp about federated instances in a couple days. People keep bitching in posts and comments.
Just host your own god damn instance for your hot takes.
Always baffles me how people just roll in and immediately start trying to reinvent the wheel. Bitch sit down and shut up, you might learn something.
Honesty compels me to admit that I did the exact same thing when I joined, rolled in here like “how are we going to deal with duplicate communities??”. The circle of life I guess
I think they want it to be more like Reddit. Carefully moderated so they can feel safe in their echo chamber. If it isn’t then they’ll complain and moral bash you into submission instead of putting in the work to host their own instance.
Carefully moderated… echo chamber
Why equate one with the other? You can have a completely unmoderated or poorly moderated echo chamber. Conversely you can have a carefully/poorly moderated or completely unmoderated communities that aren’t echo chambers.
The concepts are orthogonal.
In fact, I’d argue that completely unmoderated communities are the most likely to end up as echo chambers. Because only those with extreme views would stick around so the natural end state is a community of extremists. Example: 8chan
That is just my experience in Reddit. Mods will ban you sometimes if they don’t like your opinion even if you haven’t broken any of the rules. That mostly apply to power trippers but all your points are valid as well.
