In the spirit of being encouraged to speak my mind here’s a slight effort post:
Defederation does not do what you think it does.
The instance creator and admins are those with the ultimate power within their instance. The active users delegate them that power by interacting with their instance.
Defining “defederation” within the context of Lemmy as I understand it:
“the act of denying the ability for accounts within specific instances to interact with each other”
Anyone at this current time can create an account on most instances. One site on sh.itjust.works is defederated right now, but anyone here may also have an account there, who knows? The value comes from our activity and interaction within each instance.
Defederation is a narrow and a slippery slope because it doesn’t actually solve any problems. There are many instances which are doing things I think should be banned. I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.
We uphold an inclusive enjoyable community here by being active. Individuals with malicious intent are ostracized naturally by an active community. Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.
It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.
Staying in federation with an instance that actively embraces bad actors increases the visibility of users here to those bad actors, and gives them access to our community. Defederating such an instance is a basic best practice in the Fediverse.
More importantly for those who wring their hands about not limiting the whole community – failure to defederate from bad actor instances will be factored in when good productive instances with content folks here want to see decide whether to defederate us. (Remember that this place is already defederated by one prominent instance, which is a material detriment to users here.)
It is reasonable and normal to disagree about where the line is drawn in terms of what instances deserve defederation. It’s often ambiguous what’s a normal instance with sloppy moderation and a few bad apples[1] versus what’s a place that is run by and for bad actors.
There’s a wide range of standards that can be applied. It seems like the general vibe can be broken down into three groups:
- Only defederate spammers and child porn
- Only defederate spammers child porn and tankies
- Defederate spammers child porn, tankies, and rampantly fascist troll farms
I don’t think anyone has really advocated for anything aggressive than that on here (could be wrong)
Although also important to remember that the point of the bad apples thing is that they spoil the whole batch if you don’t take them out. ↩︎
I just want to append that a “rampantly fascist troll farm” would be something like The Stormfront, which hosts literal neo-nazis, or possibly 4chan’s /pol/ forum, where Jewish conspiracies are blamed for all the world’s ills and… only maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of the users are saying that ironically. These are real websites with real people, and if you are used to Reddit as your main social media, I would urge you to take a look just once and get an example of what actual hate speech looks like. That is, illegal in the UK, or could be used as evidence to increase the sentence in conjunction with a guilty verdict for violent crime in the US. Trumptard/trans-skeptic is no the same as rampantly fascist.
I only ask to reserve the use of the word for two reasons. One, the real thing is out there and we shouldn’t forget it. Two, accusing someone of attempting a fascist takeover of the government which would end democracy… is a pretty good excuse to take over the government and end democracy. It’s the same sort of thing as saying someone’s words are “violent” towards you in an attempt to justify (real) violence towards them.
Staying in federation with an instance that actively embraces bad actors increases the visibility of users here to those bad actors, and gives them access to our community.
It’s not our job of shielding others from bad thoughts because they may be swayed by them. And you are denying those who aren’t swayed to interct with those thoughts if they so choose.
Then why can’t a person who wants that just make an account on that server?
Or better yet, if someone so cherishes that idea of federation with everyone then just stand up their own server.
Because “just host your own server” is not an appropriate response to someone just wanting to interact with people they disagree with. And if I’m forced to make multiple accounts just to interact with all the communities, then Lemmy is no better than separate forums and there is a very good reason why Reddit was way more successful than those forums.
Not to mention, most of those instances require you to write a paragraph just to get the account approved, which is something I’m not going to do just to give counter to some users of that instance.
I think server owners might have a different opinion of their ultimate goal. Being “more successful” than Reddit probably isn’t it for a lot of them.
But hey, that’s part and parcel of it. You can’t control the fediverse unless you’re the one hosting it. I’m ok with server admins making the choice to defed or not. Their instances will grow or die accordingly. Ie. Vote with your feet.
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. On the one hand, you say:
Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.
This makes me think you are saying not to defederate because it would be better to call out bad behavior - interact with the bad actors and point out their falsehoods, hate, etc. But on the other hand, you say:
I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.
and
It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.
These make me think you are saying just ignore them. And if we’re going to just ignore them, how is that different from the perspective of the bad actors, from defederating? How does not moderating and not interacting stop bad actors?
This is all new to me, I don’t know the best use of defederating, but I didn’t follow the argument you were making.
Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.
Defederating doesn’t stop bad actors from making an account here, an active strongwilled community here can self-moderate regardless.
I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.
I don’t go to instances I don’t like which I think are shitty and filled with assholes. By doing so I would be giving the instance creators/admins value. If they come here then they can easily be banned by community moderators and admins here.
It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.
We cannot moderate other instances from sh.itjust.works, and defederating is a bad attempt to do so. The best we can do is not interact with them (post/comment on their instances), and instead moderate well here.
Thank you, I see your point now. You are worried bad actors could simply join this instance.
They could, but then they would fall under the guidelines and moderation of this instance. I’m not sure in practice how big of a worry this is.
And bad actors can join without needing to come from a banned instance.
This doesn’t change my view of defederation. (I won’t claim to know the correct use/threshold for defederation, this is all new to me! I’m mostly here to enjoy the discussions, not worry about what might go wrong.)
Defederating is made exactly for removing bad actors.
I think if we drill down to the real issue here, it’s really this: How much control should an instance have over what it’s users see and interact with?
Some folks want to be the ones to decide for themselves what they see and interact with, with minimal to no interference by the admin.
Other folks don’t want to see or deal with objectionable material, and want the admin to ensure they don’t have to.
I think the answer is somewhere between, myself. As others have pointed out, botnet instances and instances with illegal material should be defederated without mercy. Instances with little to no moderation and users that are causing problems on other instances should be considered for defederation too.
Whether to consider other cases of defederation is where it gets greyer to me. An instance that has communities that post questionable stuff, but doesn’t break that instances rules, is one such grey area. And to be clear, I’m making the case that those communities and questionable stuff live on that instance.
To other folks, that wouldn’t be grey, and I guess that’s what we’re really discussing.
Is it possible to ban an instance from my user level? That is, can I prevent myself from seeing their posts and comments on this and other instances? If so, then Blocklists might be the way to go. Sign up for a “no Nazis” list or whatever.
This is the real answer I think. Users should be treated like adults who are capable of determining by themselves what content they are comfortable with seeing.
If I don’t want to see an extremist political community on my feed, I block that community myself. If an instance is full of such communities, I block that instance myself.
I don’t want or need some other random on the internet to make judgement calls on what content I can or cannot interact with.
Defederation is a tactical nuke, that if used incorrectly will destroy the freedom, decentralization and openness of Lemmy, and replace it with a far more centralized series of walled gardens.
I fear that people are trying to recreate the reddit model on Lemmy. Lemmy is not reddit, Lemmy is better than reddit. Reddit is top down, Lemmy is bottom up. We don’t need more mod control, we need more user control.
I would love to see more features built for user moderation of content. Perhaps I could subscribe to another users blocklist, or follow their ‘recommended communities’. Instances themselves could maintain suggested block lists, and users could chose to enable or disable them at their own discretion.
Honestly, I’m not sure that defederation has any place at all. Even things like spam and bot instances I think would be better handled by a blocklist (enabled by default even), that users can turn on or off as they see fit.
Why are you trying to view everything and ban things you don’t like instead of viewing your subscriptions and only joining communities you do like?
I want to see what communities are out there and active. I’d rather not be stuck in a walled garden of my own making. My default sort is currently Local/Active, but I’m still playing with it.
I also want to see communities out there, but instances defederating makes it a whole hell of a lot harder because it kills visibility of those instances. I don’t want to have to swap between a handful of accounts to just have basic functionality all because moralizing assholes want this to be like reddit
Yes, you can block users. Click the 3 dots on my comment and then hit that little 🚫 symbol, and boom, I’m blocked.
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