cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/114721
My humble takes on the most popular Lemmy instances, or “how to piss off the whole Fediverse with a single meme”.
Here are the links to each one of the mentioned instances:
Far Left Centre Left Centre Right Far Right Lemmygrad Exploding Heads Hexbear Lemmy.ml Lemmy.world Beehaw Pricefield Lemmy Based Count sh.itjust.works Blåhaj Lemmy Divisions by zero Lemmy NSFW Hack Liberty
To be fair to the large number of blocked instances on the Beehaw blocklist, most of them are from a starter blocklist that’s been circulated through the fediverse of “These are skinhead and child sexual abuse material instances. Block them before they even try to federate.” I think the only true defederation controversy is with Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works and that was a purely mechanical issue of “too much troll traffic all at once and no tools to surgically handle it rather than just burn down the whole thing”
I’m wondering what “over 400 blocked instances” means in practical terms. Most of us have no idea if 400 is a large or small number in relation to the size of the fediverse. Most of us don’t know how big those blocked instances are, or if they even exist anymore.
Mostly, as you explain, I don’t care about numbers if what they’re blocking is hatred and abuse. Maybe “over 400 blocked instances” is supposed to be a criticism, but to me, it sounds like the people running Beehaw are doing their jobs well.
That’s a fair concern. You can check the data for yourself on the awesome-lemmy-instances repository; alternatively I have made this tool to make the search more interactive and user friendly: defed.xyz.
Short answer to your question is: 410 is a lot. They are the second instance for number of defeds, only beaten by feddit.dk. Most big instances tend to have between 30 and 50 blocks, with the notable exception of sh.itjust.works which has only 5.
To give credit where credit is due, few of the instances blocked by beehaw actually run Lemmy and even fewer are active (2 or more monthly active users). This doesn’t change the fact that it’s a BIG number.
edit: pinging @[email protected] as this partially answers their question.
We have a large number of blocks too, but that’s because we auto sync our blocklist between our instances, so we end up with lots of non Lemmy instances on the list
It’s 10 times the number of instances that lemmy.ml blocks, if that helps.
Not really. How many users are on the blocked instances? How many of those instances have tried to federate with Beehaw? How active are the people on the blocked instances? How active are people not on those instances who do interact with them? A raw number of instances isn’t that useful to understanding the impact on the network graph
Many are also Mastodon instances, which can be particularly troublesome.
The problem with large blocking lists is that they can’t be easily audited. How do you know if there’s any legit website amongst 400 links?
It’s also a problem with how much information Lemmy makes available. In most of the fediverse the block list includes a reason field
Yeah, it would also be great if a user could easily sort blocked communities by software, to stop seeing all the mastodon and pleroma instances.
I like the idea of filters and sorting. Also I liked the old layout better where there was a vertical split with federated instances on the left and defederated instances on the right
I agree. I think relying too heavily on blocklists can be a detriment to the growth and decentralization of the Fediverse. Who even decides what ends up on them? Maybe you pass through the crossair of whoever handles that while they’re having a bad day and boom, you’re barred out of 2/3 of all the content.
I don’t mind big blocklists honestly, the problem with auditing is purely on a UX side - if we would have a way to sort/filter isntances by software and have some kind of grouping (“all of these instances are on a list of badies”), it wouldn’t be such a problem.
What’s really a problem is whitelisting. It’s proactively punishing those who use small/personal instances, and not federating is much easier than defederating, so it’ll more probably be abused by admins.
What’s really a problem is whitelisting.
Agreed. Fortunately very few instances rely on that. The only decently big one is hexbear.net, the second biggest both of our instances are barred from has 41 active users and all the others have only a single digit of active users. Not that big of a loss.
Data for your instance: https://defed.xyz/check/eviltoast.org
I can imagine whitelisting to become more popular as Lemmy user base grows and communities become more suitable for lurkers and non-techies who know nothing about federation.
Data for your instance: https://defed.xyz/check/eviltoast.org
It’s such a contrast seeing blank blocklist after using Beehaw and blahaj honestly. Small instances are so much better tbh. And this tool is great, thanks! I hope we’ll figure out how to get a list of blocked communities somehow. This lack of transparency is so annoying.
For real. Small instances ftw. Glad you enjoy my tool. Investigating blocked communities might be a feature for a future upgrade, thanks for the idea.
The political compass isn’t real
I view it as a useful over simplification. We can simplify politics all the way down to “Left/Right” but that ignores so much of what motivates and drives people. In our current political environment, an ecofascist and an anarchosyndicalist might both be labeled as “left” even though the only thing they have in common is thinking “Maybe we shouldn’t just destroy the planet?” so the political compass is an easy to print visual aid to help guide people to that political views exist along multiple spectrums. My personal view is that the current best “political quiz with information at the backend about who you fit with” is 9axes, and that’s mostly because we’ve gotten to a point where we’re ready to start labeling the political compass as “no longer a useful over simplification, and instead a gross oversimplification”
an ecofascist and an anarchosyndicalist might both be labeled as “left”
but one isn’t left, because any sort of fascism is incompatible with the left no matter what they call themselves, which is a perfect example of why the PC is bullshit - authoritarianism is inherently incompatible with leftism, but authoritarians and the right in general will, as it has done throughout history, co-opt leftist language and ideas to legitimise themselves and gain power.
The fact that the PC even exists, let alone how many people think it’s reflective of reality, is just more evidence of the ignorance, both wilful and fostered (via state sanctioned education seeking to deny us an understanding of the system or the critical thinking skills to examine it, minimising any challenge to the status quo) that exists around politics, which the compass only serves to deepen.
Left and Right are far too ill defined in a complicated political system to say authoritarianism is inherently incompatible with leftism. The very first left / right split was between two different groups of authoritarians with one side wanting to a government similar to the prior monarchy they had enjoyed, and the other side establishing a brutal dictatorship that killed 40,000 people for not hating the concept of monarchy enough. We need a more complicated metaphor than Left / Right because otherwise we get stuck in “no true Scotsman” debates about the many different spectrums of opinion someone can have. I agree the political compass sucks, I don’t agree its a tool to coopt leftness by right wingers. I think, as I said, what we need is to start normalizing more complicated spectrum tools like 8values and 9axes
It just amazes me that our little instance went from something for me to play with, to an instance at the centre of ongoing fedi drama, and the source of several memes.
You’re doing an excellent job and if I’d known what a blahaj was I probably would have started on your instance
Our instance fucking rules and offers the most interesting and diverse communities on Lemmy. Thank you for your efforts.
Obvious Beehaw bias but I don’t get the whole weirdness about defed. Like maybe it’s a hammer where some problems are screws, but elegant solutions are for people with VC funding.
It can seem authoritarian or an overreaction of you don’t know why the decision was made.
Once a critic learns that defederating was a last-choice decision reluctantly made because of inadequate mod tools and a small, overwhelmed staff, things make more sense. If they still want to complain after that, I just walk away. Sometimes people have already decided to be angry regardless of what the facts are, and debate never helps in those situations.
There’s also just a lot of “if it gets repeated enough it enters the collective consciousness as truth” where regardless if someone just casually observing sees the same thing over and over and just assumes the popular take must be the truth. The willfully ignorant poison the narrative for the casual observer, and now there’s a set narrative divorced from what the original reasoning was
I just read that:
You see beehaw users complaining about not having access to [email protected] , because while there is [email protected] , it has two posts that are 2 months old
Hello there
If defederation is censorship then refusing to take a pamphlet from someone handing them out on the street is censorship
I think nobody has a problem with you not taking the pamphlet, but you telling me that I’m not allowed to take that pamphlet, there the problems start.
he’s right there. he has the pamphlets. he’s giving them away for free. it’s 100% available to anyone who wants it. no one is stopping you from doing anything, they’re just not helping.
It’s not true, they say of you take the pamphlet then I will never talk to you agan and will make sure you can’t talk to me either.
who is saying that? who is saying that if you have an account on a defederated instance that you can’t also have an account on their instance?
I think there is a misunderstanding here, I didn’t say that you can’t create a new instance or a new account on a different instance to technically go around the defederation (for a limited time). I also don’t understand what your point is, the people from exploding heads can do that too.
the misunderstanding is in that I don’t understand where defederating is in any way censorship, but everyone is treating it as though it’s censorship. Defederating is just refusing to help spread someone’s speech, which is perfectly fine and reasonable. The message I refuse to signal boost is still there, people can see it, they can even choose to boost it further if they want. The people who originate the message are not locked out of the instance that defederate them either. But everyone acts like this is the equivalent of putting a gun to someone’s head and demanding that they shut up and I’m honestly really confused about it.
you telling me that I’m not allowed
You are not your Lemmy account, and you are specifically not one single Lemmy account. If you don’t like the policy of an instance, you can try to change it or go somewhere else. Ok right, in the attempt to influence policy, you can play the ‘you telling me that I’m not allowed’-card.
Now that I think about it, the most uncensored Lemmy experience is being logged out. Every content is visible, no middle man can hinder you to visit these sites. It’s a bit like when a public library decides to organize their books into separate rooms. Would you call that censorship because you have to walk between the rooms to access all the content?
Censorship would be fitting if certain content would be erased from the library. I think that’s only possible on Lemmy if all instances agree.
abuse defed
Lol. How can you “abuse” defederation? Are instances not allowed to decide who they talk to?
The right likes to think that they have a right to push their ideas on you
The thing is that from what I can see they are not. If your instance doesn’t defederate from let’s say exploding heads or hexbear then people start with shaming you for that first and then defederating from your instance. So in this way no, they seem not allowed to decide who they talk to.
Well if you regularly hang out with Nazis, I wouldn’t want to hang out with you. That’s life
Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works I’d say are a little left? And exploding-heads, less authoritarian right, more boomer gab people instance with misused meme formats galore, totally unfun. Big R Republicans packed to the brim. Boring as fuck.
There’s not really a top right corner instance anymore, there used to be one, hosted at nobodyhasthe.biz. Those guys were what you’d expect, N word everywhere everything is about Jews chud memes black sun all of that shit.
I can’t believe I keep seeing this slander of Blahaj. We federated with those tankie communities as an olive branch. And they defederated with us after it became clear we didn’t like them. We aren’t a bunch of safe space tenderqueers, we tried to make a difficult relationship work.
And Beehaw defederated because they needed more moderators / more moderation tools.
You’ve also put censorship in the bottom left of the political compass…
I didn’t know that I needed a Pricefield instance until now. But it’s down.
It’s up now. Not terribly active, unfortunately, but I love that someone had the dedication of creating one. And, as I said the meme, their theme is lovely.
Kbin is probably in the center. I just want to grill in my Linux computer.
It’s funny because everything I heard about beehaw would make me put them in the authoritarian right category with we want your e-mail for registration, we defederate everything that we don’t like
I am gonna give a hot-take, but we need more conservative on the fediverse, of course I don’t talk about the nazi uncle who still say that During the war, German soldiers were well behave unlike the Americans but classic liberal who support people like Macron/Merkel/Von der leyen and other reasonable right-winger are people we can talk-with
I feel like they are near the Orange LibLeft quadrant: a liberal that actually ends up behaving in a somewhat authoritarian manner in enforcing their beliefs onto others for the sake of safety, diversity and so on.
Both beehaw and their admins are great and at the end of the day the beauty of the fediverse is that everyone can run their instance as they please. I just wish there was another way to fix this sort of probems without having to block 5k+ people from accessing your website.
I am gonna give a hot-take, but we need more conservative on the fediverse
100% agree. And no, this doesn’t mean Trump supporters. In fact it doesn’t even mean anything close to the American right. Other countries have reasonable and functioning centre-right parties and I’d love to have something like that on Lemmy.
I’ve never seen Exploding Heads but I’ve heard things… It’s the only one shown on this chart I think I have any issue with, if what I’ve heard is true.
The entire bottom half though is like my whole shit.
I’m subscribed to [email protected] and haven’t seen any problems there, it’s kind of a normal Tech and privacy community, that’s why I didn’t de-federate from them. I probably blocked some users from there.
Thats why I host my own Instance
Pricefield really does have a fun theme. Basically unreadable, but fun.
I guess I’m going to self host. Better that than having to create yet another account on yet another instance just because it got defederated
I agree and I do that with all the fediverse services, if I care enough to use it then I also care enough to host a single-user instance for myself.
Try unilem. They have an explicit policy of not defederating from any instance.
