The only threat to this burgeoning community is the same old divide & collapse nonsense that separates citizens under their overlords everywhere.
I would create accounts and start calling to defederate instances which allow non-polite (or politically incorrect or otherwise offensive) communities.
We didn’t just survive the trolls on reddit. We thrived amongst them. We can handle them. We can block them.
I want curatorial tools to curate my own feed. I absolutely 100% do NOT want any admins telling me what I can’t read. And going to another instance is no solution if that instance is blocked.
I don’t want to be on a purely polite ecosystem, or a purely right-wing-idiot ecosystem. I want access to everybody, and the tools to curate that experience.
The trolls do NOT have the power to take us down. But the admins definitely do.
Welcome to the Defediverse.
I’m pretty sure this is what caused beehaw to defederate lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Several pro-reddit people posted to reddit (on a sub that is now private) about doing just that. It worked and took 48 hours or less for beehaw to defederate them. But there was a lot of discussion about the situation across several servers and it doesnt really seem to have worked to fracture the community other than isolating beehaw which already wanted to be fairly isolated to begin with.
Do you have a recommend server? I just joined the latter one, does that mean I won’t be able to participate in certain communities?
The first thing I saw on this site was “you’re a N*”** F***" which isn’t a great sign…
I tried signing up to multiple different instances I guess? The first few were full. I’m new here and just want to make sure I’m at the right place, not loving that the first thing I see is pretty racist and homophobic
Try joining smaller instances. It’s nice if they are run by people with good reputation in the libre world. I’m in lemmy.sdf.org and it’s pretty good.
If you don’t want to see any kind of offensive content, I recommend signing up to Beehaw. It’s a self proclaimed “safe space”. This means that they actively delete offensive content, they do not allow nsfw, and they defederate from any instance they see as a danger to this safe space.
You can also browse instances from join-lemmy.org and look at their blocked instances. If you see instances that block many or some major instances that are right wing or promote things you don’t like, you’ll know you found the right place that will disallow offensiveness in your feed. :)
If you scroll to the bottom of the page there is a link called “Instances”, there you can see all the federated and defederated instances of the instance you are currently on.
Instead of defederating whole servers, I would like admins to have an “opt out” or “un-default” button, then each user can browse the list of servers that have been opted out and individually opt in again instead of having to move their username to a different server.
I would grudgingly accept having the ability to op-in to “problematic” instances or communities. As long as I’m not denied any functionality. It’s an acceptable compromise.
That’s much better than opt out, the default shouldn’t direct you to hateful communities
this
instead of having to move their username to a different server.
IMO this is a separate problem; I’d like the ability to move my account between servers and preserve my comment history and subscriptions.
The comment history migration will not happen. It’s not feasible with the way fedi software works. Subscription migration tools exist but are limited, and I am sure they will grow more prolific in the future, because the tools for it are getting better.
It’s not feasible with the way fedi software works.
I admit it’s more complicated than it first seems, and I’m not deeply familiar with the ActivityPub protocol, but could you elaborate on why it wouldn’t be feasible to extend AP to support user account migration?
I know there’s some kind of identity hashing for servers. If you want to change a user’s entire identity you’d also have to convince all servers that this hash is still yours elsewhere. Maybe if you trigger it from the original server. I don’t know enough of the software to design a solution but it’s not the simplest thing and it’s not built for that. Maybe ask someone with more technical knowledge.
I have a fairly good idea of how this could be implemented, but like I said, it’s more complicated than it first seems.
The issue you mentioned could be solved by the “old” server signing a JWT token that includes both the old user ID and the new user ID. The “new” server would store that token and make it available via an API endpoint so other servers and users could verify that the account on the “new” server is legitimate. This way accounts can be verified even if the original server goes offline.
Bluesky fixed the account portability on federated network problem, look at their docs - your post history and everything can come with you when you change instances
We did not thrive amongst trolls on Reddit. Reddit banned and contained certain subreddits. It works. It made the platform a better place for everyone else. Defederation accomplishes the same thing
Defederating instances doesn’t just block a hateful subreddit. It blocks all the communities and members.
Also, we totally 100% thrived among them before they were banned.
Also, they didn’t always ban them. They sometimes just blocked them from /r/all but we could still go read them and interact.
Defederation is unhealthy and gross.
defedrate until mods catch up with the task of cleaning rancid human waste, then refederate again, no problem. things shouldn’t be rushed. take the ukraine war for exemple, the enemy is slowly but surely weakend to its death. also if an instance gets to be defederated, their user base have to be aware that there are trolls among them, and that they need to learn manners and behave, while instance admin/mods have to block sign ups and ban the culprit usernames. once the sanitation work is complete, they could reach out to the instance that got defederated from them so they could refederate, and from then on its a matter of credibility and trust. if an instance admin isnt serious about cleaning his intance he could stay locked out to oblivion and the unfortunate users could blame their instance admin for its demise and not making their time spent there worthwile… and from then on it is just survival of the fittest: whoever get to maintain his instance will rack up a healthy userbase.
Maybe I’m being pessimistic, but this whole thing is starting to sound like “don’t interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” Was it rigged from the start? For a couple of days everyone was civil and in less than a week, “Let’s Get Ready toooo RUMBLE”!
Was there another way?
a decentralized platform (aka fediverse) is already divided, that’s just the nature of how it’s set up.
the real issue is that, by trying to create “safe” spaces (as beehaw did), defederating all instances that challenge that mindset just creates insular and rather meaningless echo chambers.
ultimately, this platform will devolve into close minded communities
I understand that it’s a technicas issue that we have to have instances with a lot of people on them right now so that the more technically inclined people can set up the software so that the others can just use it. But the problem is that when it is like that then there are two sides of the problem, users have no control over their content and what they can consume and admins can be responsible for things the users do/post.
I really hope that in the future there will be some technology which would be able to live without central sevrers but instead it would be a p2p sollution which would replicate itself onto your devices where you want to have it. Only then we’ll be able to be autonomous enough.
We have bittorrent with the magnet links which are only a couple of bytes big, back in the day I kind of suspected that on top of something like that we would build p2p social networks, but it never happened, I’m not sure why.
It’s data cost. Private torrent sites are the exception, but most people who torrent don’t continue to seed for a long time, which means that availability is low and the bandwidth cost is usually split among just a handful of users with a seedbox, which is basically getting back to the idea of a server. How do you motivate people to use up their bandwidth and pay for the extra electricity to keep the availability and speed reasonable?
The most similar thing I can think of to what you’re talking about is i2p, but that comes with all the speed and connnectivity problems that are commonplace for the dark web, and the vast majority of mainstream users have no interest in engaging with a complicated P2P network that serves content at speeds that make you feel like you’re living in 2003.
Unless the mindset of the general computer user changes, we are unlikely to see any system take off that doesn’t rely on a central team of motivated people to do the backend work that the users simply don’t want to worry about.
I would love to see an actual protocol like email or torrents replacing all social media. Then we wouldn’t have to rely on admins to protect us from the baddies, or graciously allow us access to each other. We could just block rude people, and subscribe to interesting people.
Email is probably the technology where admins have to do the most to protect you from the baddies.
The problem is really inherent in any technology that allows anyone to contact anyone else without pre-screening (like an add to friendslist feature most messengers have).
Yeah I was just about to say. What do they think a spam filter is but admins protecting you. This isn’t even talking about the trust system within emails where you can’t email someone al all basically if your email server isn’t trusted and configured correctly.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC policies, DMARC reporting, ARC, DNS RBLs for IPs and Domains, Bayesian spam filters, various honeypots, systems for exchanging user spam reports, virus scanners, MTA-STS and SMTP TLS reporting,…
I doubt there is any other technology that has spawned this many technologies to protect users from bad actors.
Wait, email is basically exactly lika ActivityPub, it also relies on servers like outlook, gmail and so on. And those servers have to have admins and those admins do block other servers because of all the spam.
Exactly. While lemmy does need better tools to help mitigate the problem on a more granular level, at the end of the day if you have a lot of spam coming from one instance then defederating from that instance will always be a valid option.
Spam servers constitute a technical issue so I think that defederating them is entirely different from just defederating instances that allow trolls and right wingers (or centrists or whatever).
They block spam, they don’t block servers just because people are emailing shitposts or being politically incorrect.
Blocking spam servers is totally different from blocking “problematic” servers.
RBL’s are nothing more than a way to block problematic servers. And some of those problems are nothing more than they don’t have a rdns.
That’s not due to technical differences though. Blocking/defederating is entirely up to the admins, so it’s more of a cultural issue than technical. If a social media network was built around SMTP (email) it would see the same censorship debate were seeing with ActivityPub (Lemmy, etc).
the whole point of fediverse is that everyone should spin up their own instance. if everyone just joins someone else’s server, it kinda defeats the purpose.
and yea, if i was them, i would also create a bunch of accounts to spam non-leftwing-moderated instances with racist and nazi stuff to give them ammunition for defederation, just like they do on 4chan
edit: addendum: activity pub sucks
How about embrace and enshittyfy like Google Talk did with XMPP?
Porque no los dos?
I’m okay with blocking corporate instances because they’ll find a way to do top-down domination. But I don’t want some admin stepping between me and other posters.
Now let’s have a good and narrow definition of corporate instance and we might agree on that.
Right, if they’re clever they’ll pretend to be just another group of nerds looking to create a new instance.
But if they create an official Meta instance and start advertising it, then we will know who to block. And if they want to really dominate I think they’ll make it official.
So you’re pretending that users who call for defederating an alt-right instance are basically trolls that created their account just for that and to divide users? When it’s well known that it’s alt-right communities that are filled with bots and foreign troll farms?
Ok.
At the same time “people” against it keep recreating new discussions about being against defederation… Seems pretty sus to me 🤔 You’re sure you’re barking at the right tree? I’m starting to suspect that you guys are just a bunch of EH (or whatever) users coming here to cause trouble… It would fit with the fact that a whole bunch of anti-defederation users were also hanging around or moderating on the local T_D community until it was banned.
You know you can create your own instance and you can be its sole user so you get to chose what you do with it? The admin here decided to give users democratic control over the instance and contrary to a Nation, it’s very very easy to move to another instance if your disagree with the will of the majority so much that you don’t feel welcome anymore.
I think I get where they’re coming from, it’s like how sometimes how I’ll pop on over to /r/conservative every now and then to read through some of the posts, although the majority is “the schools are turning our kids trans”
I like to see things from other people’s perspective, despite how Internet opposed to it I may be. When I hear a new story for example, there’s typically two versions of it. One from a voice that seems reasonable and well tempered and one that’s rash and unhinged.
Often I’ll find that the truth sometimes lies somewhere in between, not saying it’s right in the middle, but having a fuller perspective helps me come to own conclusions.
With that said, I don’t think this way of consuming media works for all people or even most people. I’m a pretty objective person, maybe even to a fault. I’m not offended easily, which makes viewing communities that many would find delusional and offensive not an unpleasant experience for me.
Again, people who don’t agree with the way an instance is managed can just take their luggage and leave for an instance they prefer or they can create their own instance. That’s decentralization baby!
Feels like the crypto crowd, people complaining about management because they don’t understand what decentralization means.
Not happy? Create your own project and manage it however you like. Be the change you want to see, that’s the power you’re given here and that you don’t have in the real world!
But now you are asking for the equivalent of every reddit user to make their own subreddit, host it and curate a feed to it, so they can browse it.
I mean sure, but it’d be like saying, you don’t like the options for food, so grow your own, the seeds are there. You may want some junk food, but you may also want some organic vegitable produce or something inbetween. Supermarkets are double edges sowrds with everything inbetween, but to open your own/grow your own/source your own from the bulk suppliers, although possible, is astronomically more man hours of curation time.
But with all that said, the initial and I think leading point of the post was not the indivdual filtering, but rather, that they think a divide and conquer approach would be most effective against a Fediverse. Where one would want to prevent the expansion and adoption of a fediverse as a threat of info hoarding.
I’d be inclined to agree that as pack animals a NT person is going to want to group up in the largest instance. So, the larger the instance, the more likely they are going to want to join it. And should it get huge amounts of people, they’d get fomo.
If there are as many instances as there are subreddit equivalents, for want of the accurate name, people just wont bother that much, no?-
The point of decentralization is exactly that though! People don’t need to be all under the same roof for things to work, this way no central authority can control what’s happening.
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Your food example doesn’t work because in this case creating your own instance doesn’t prevent you from interacting with the other instances unless you’re acting in a way that makes them defederate from yours, so you can eat whatever you want as long as you don’t take a shit in your neighbors plate.
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Same as #1, the point of decentralization is to divide things to prevent control.
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You don’t understand how the fediverse works if you experience fomo for an instance because it’s bigger. It doesn’t matter what instance you sign up to as long as it’s federated with the other ones you want to interact with and that won’t be an issue unless you join an instance populated by morons and if you do you probably deserve to not have access to the whole fediverse because it shows you’re not intelligent or mature enough not to associate with morons. And worst case just create a new account on another instance if you’re not happy that the one you signed up to is defederated!
As I said, I feel like I’m arguing with the crypto crowd about decentralization all over again.
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Again, people who don’t agree with the way an instance is managed can just take their luggage and leave for an instance they prefer or they can create their own instance.
We can toss this right back at you. If you’re all for defederating anything you don’t like, there’s other instances to use.
Well I’m the one calling for respecting the will of the admin which is that the instance be managed democratically, I’m not the one complaining that defederation is bad after people voted in majority in favor of defederating an alt right instance. It’s not about what I don’t like, it’s about what the majority wants, which seems to go against your opinion but in favor of mine so I don’t know why I should be leaving 🤷
it’s about what the majority wants, which seems to go against your opinion but in favor of mine
You sure about that? You’re one of the main people that was pushing to defederate exploding-heads, which clearly hasn’t happened. Please elaborate how you’re “in the majority”
A vote took place and defederation won. As for why it hasn’t happened yet? Go ask The Dude, he seemed keen on defederating Lemmygrad but not so much an alt-right instance.
Our complaints are part of an ongoing conversation about the future of the fediverse. This is a super important moment, and this is the right time for us to flesh out all the little details in our arguments. It’s fine for you to disagree, but it’s weird for you to jump in and complain about the fact that we’re sharing our opinions.
We’re not exactly doing a mutiny or anything. We are sharing our opinions on a forum.
You’re literally and explicitly intolerant.
The way this instance is managed has been decided already and you don’t agree with it, it’s that simple. There’s no discussion to be had since you’re in favor of removing a right the admin gave the users (voting to defederate an instance). Take your pick, there’s plenty of other instances to choose from and worst case create your own with your own rules.
And no we’re not having a conversation about the future of the fediverse since you’re expressing an uninformed opinion because you don’t understand decentralization. Deciding the future of the fediverse would require centralization, the whole point is that each part can go in whatever direction it goes, no one can decide how the whole thing should work. If that’s what you want then go back to Reddit and apply for an admin job, then you can discuss with people who have power over the direction a whole semi-decentralized system goes.
You are… taking part in the conversation with me. So you do think there’s a conversation to be had. And this whole site is a conversation site.
You’re worked up. Relax. I haven’t hurt you.
I think I get where they’re coming from, it’s like how sometimes how I’ll pop on over to /r/conservative every now and then to read through some of the posts, although the majority is “the schools are turning our kids trans”
I like to see things from other people’s perspective, despite how Internet opposed to it I may be. When I hear a new story for example, there’s typically two versions of it. One from a voice that seems reasonable and well tempered and one that’s rash and unhinged.
But this can also be done by going to the defederated instance directly. Just like you would visit the subreddit directly because it would rarely show up in /r/all
This is exactly it.
Defederation, to my mind (and someone feel free to correct me) is about minimizing a given server’s exposure to other servers that, by one definition or another, are problematic. Bots made out of the control of the people maintaining the server, servers with a large concentration of trolls, or other factors that either create risk for an instance owner or a shitty experience for the users as a net group they support.
For anyone crying out “Censorship! Hive minds and safe spaces for soy bois!” - these other instances don’t just disappear. You can still reach them, still read them, still make an account there, still capture RSS feeds, etc. etc. As a user, you have plenty of ways to see and interact with whatever instance you choose, even if one instance is defederated from another.
Both explodingheads* and lemmygrad, in my opinion, are appropriate candidates for defederation with the above in mind. Both far-right and far-left politically focused communities with loose moderation are prone to brigading and, given laws around hate speech in Canada, create legal risks for sh.itjust.works (yes, lemmygrad too, calls for or support of genocide against racial or religious minorities are hate speech no matter what your rationale is). Cutting off direct interaction between these instances is a protection to our admin’s resources and level of liability.
But if you, personally, want to engage with these communities, there’s literally nothing stopping you, you just can’t do it from here. Stop expecting that one specific instance will spoon-feed you everything you want, every time - that’s how we got to where we are with mainstream social media. Where splinters exist, figure out ways around them.
*mentioned though I think we’re still federated with EH? What’s the hold up?
So you’re pretending that users who call for defederating an alt-right instance are basically trolls that created their account just for that and to divide users?
Nope. I’m saying defederation plays into the hands of BigSocial. They’re laughing as we divide ourselves so they can easily conquer.
When it’s well known that it’s alt-right communities that are filled with bots and foreign troll farms?
Many troll farms are not foreign, you xenophobe!
And are YOU “pretending” that every shitposter and non-politically-correct interlocutor is a “foreign” (??) troll bot?
Remember, we didn’t leave reddit because of trolls. We left reddit because of overbearing admins. I don’t want to also leave lemmy because of overbearing admins.
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Bot confirmed
Many troll farms are not foreign, you xenophobe!It’s a Canadian instance so yeah, troll farms are foreign.
BigSocialAlright, you’re just pissed because it’s your friends that are getting deplatformed, you just made that pretty clear.
And are YOU "pretending" that every shitposter and non-politically-correct interlocutor is a "foreign" (??) troll bot?No, I’m just stating a fact, the majority of troll farms are impersonating alt-right people, not people on the left and it’s an alt-right instance people are asking to see defederated because the extremes left instance is already defederated anyway.
Remember, we didn't leave reddit because of trolls. We left reddit because of overbearing admins. I don't want to also leave lemmy because of overbearing admins.I just gave you the solution, be your own admin, create your own instance, shitpost wherever you want and let this instance be managed the way the admin decided it should be.
Edit:
That’s fucking rich!
In your history:
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/449630
So you just proved that you don’t mind defederation as long as it suits your interests. How hypocritical of you… Which is funny because that’s always what happens when looking at the post history of the anti-defederation, they have a comment somewhere about them agreeing with censorship of some sort but are screaming that all censorship is bad if it concerns something they’re attached to.
F off back to exploding heads you troll.
you don’t mind defederation as long as it suits your interests
I want to keep reddit & meta corporate goons from taking over this corner of the internet. That’s completely different from preventing two people from communicating via federated networks. This is totally consistent with giving control to the users. I want the users to have control, and to NOT have it taken away by admins. In both scenarios this is what I’m arguing for, and that’s clear and obvious.
F off back to exploding heads you troll.
If you talk this way to people who respectfully disagree, you’re the same kind of toxic person that you want to ban. The defederation is fueled by hate. You’re so eager to exile. And that’s consistent with your ugly remarks to me.
*giving control to the users.*Like by deciding democratically how the instance should be managed?
You don’t understand how decentralization works if you think Meta or whatever can take control of a decentralized platform like Lemmy and the point still stands, you’re pro defederation if it fits your (uninformed) values but against it if it doesn’t but you create a post against defederation which is basically virtue signalling that you’re so pro free speech and individual responsibility when the truth is you’re just an hypocrite.
And of course democracy includes sharing our opinions about how to run things.
And if you don’t think corporations can undermine grass roots movements then you’re the one who’s uninformed.
Opinions have been shared and a vote happened and you’re asking for the possibility to vote on something be removed. How democratic of you.
Decentralization prevents corporations from doing anything against it, they can create their own instance if they want to, it will never prevent people from just creating a branch of the whole project, that’s the beauty of open source code and decentralization. Lemmy turns to shit? Take the code and create Lemmu with a Lemurian as a mascot to replace it, that’s all.
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I imagine the Fediverse isn’t really a threat? They can play the long game and probably don’t care about the amount of people who left. There’s not much to gain bringing us down either since we’ll just migrate somewhere else.
It’s more of an opportunity than a great. More avenues for data collection and control. If we migrate somewhere else then they will follow. They’re not going to stop wanting our data, and controlling our interactions, and manipulating our behavior.
dis gon be gud
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I’m not necessarily calling them psy ops (because we all know that corporations are too wholesome to do anything so sneaky). But I am 100% saying that they play into the hands of meta and google etc.
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Did you read about meta reaching out to the Mastodon folks, seeking to host a private talk?
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Do you think Google saw XMPP as a threat?
Edit: “threat” isn’t the right word. I should have said “potential revenue stream.” And once something is a (potential) revenue stream, a business will try to maximize that revenue. Just look at what reddit is doing with its API…
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Google talk used XMPP when it was launched, but they eventually dropped support. I don’t think they were intentionally trying to harm XMPP, I think they saw an opportunity to launch a product with a pre-established user base, then later determined they’d have a larger market share if they dropped XMPP (because it would force people to switch to Google Talk to keep taking to their friends).
Upper leadership (eg. CEO) at these large corporations normally have a “fiduciary duty” to the share holders to maximize profits, which is a legal obligation. They can be sued for “fiduciary neglect” if they intentionally make decisions that prioritize something other than shareholder profits.
