Did anyone talk about forcing instance owners or any other person to do or say something they don’t want?!

Sorry but I think you have not even read the post. I’m talking about all these negativity towards other instances from average users in here. If and instance owner decides to defederate of course I might disagree but there’s not much I can do about it, specially if they can present reasons.

If anyone can prove that some other Instance is harmful it’s just natural that it should be defederated (in most cases)

Again. My issue is talking nonsense about oh that company is trying to destroy us whilst in reality they have hundreds of millions of users and are gaining more each second and we’re sitting here circle jerking about our nice little community.

I say we should be open to new experiments. I am not saying defederation is bad, I am not saying instance owners should be forced to do anything

TBH, I haven’t delve deep in exact architecture of these systems. AFAIK posts and all data remain on instance of OP but when you like, boost etc. it’s not like your data is transferred to that instance, and you’ve lost your privacy.

Each time somebody interacts with your post by creating a reply, boosting it (retweeting), or favoriting (liking), this needs to be propagated to other servers (where your followers are located).

If the interaction itself happens on another server than where the post was originally created, first we need to notify the origin server and only then perform the propagation.

The architecture of Mastodon

But I guess you’re making a different argument. Yes we’re using threads every time we interact with a user there, but again we’re not seeing ads, we’re not giving every single click and page view to meta. It’s not ideal but it’s way better than using threads UI!

Great comment! Totalitarianism better describes this notion. My biggest problem is with these people thinking they know better, truth is we don’t know. All of these are social experiments and instead of taking preemptive drastic measures we can take a light handed approach and make decisions democratically whenever actually needed.

At this point you’re trolling. have fun I won’t respond

And as someone who lived most of my life under an authoritarian regime, I don’t respect your advocation for censorship. If you knew the effect of thinking you know better than anyone and can decide for them, you would never make such comments.

But no one is forcing you to comment! You’ve expressed your opposition and I respect your opinion!

At this point I’m getting bad vibes from you TBH! I’ve expressed my opinion and apparently some people find it compelling and some disagree, that’s fine!

Well, it was always my opinion! No one’s opinion is a fact, necessarily. Let’s agree to disagree! glhf

Thanks for this great comment! Yes, I totally agree with your arguments and personally hate meta. My problem is posts like this and misinformation about underlying tech (like privacy and ads). Meta will do anything to be the sole winner, but as I’ve pointed here it’s a dilemma and defederating can actually encourage more users to stop using Fediverse to begin with!

Social Consensus! This should be part of the culture that unless some instance is factually harming us or content there is illegal (for jurisdiction of the hosted instance) we should not defederate.

Did you really just equate trying to leave an authoritarian country with signing up for a different federated instance?

Yes I am, you are suggesting I don’t know the meaning of these words, so I’ve provided an example of the exact same situation (importance doesn’t change meaning of words here, does it?)

If you censor me, you have censored me! The fact that you’re a government or admin of instance doesn’t change word’s meaning.

this is probably some nuance you should have provided in your original post where you only say that calling for defederation makes you a “dictator” and in no way indicate that there are situation where you think defederation is appropriate.

In hindsight, I should’ve but in response to most comments I’ve acknowledged that it’s fine in a lot of situations

But second of all, how would you enforce what you are proposing? If larger instances were prevented somehow from defederating, wouldn’t that require some sort of “authority” making that decision for those instance? That doesn’t seem to align with your values based on what you’ve posted.

May I ask what made you think I’m looking for enforcement here? I believe in human coordination and freedom of choice. If I join a general instance, I don’t expect admins to decide who I can interact with, that’s all!

Like everything else context matters

If you pay attention to my response, I’ve said that if you close them now, considering how many users they’ve amassed in like 1 day you would have to join threads (at least the average user will). And when you see the convenience there, you will use Fediverse less and less, so what’s the point?

What I mean by understanding your point is that you’re right, that’s a threat, but I believe what I’ve just said is also a scenario. This is a dilemma.

No one is stopping you to migrate from an authoritarian country either (most of the time) and yet they’re called authoritarian. Also, I’m not saying instances “shouldn’t be allowed to defederate”, I’m saying advocating for this on a general instance with 100K users is wrong. If this was a niche or small community with agreed upon and shared values (like beehaw for example) that would be understandable.

Saying things like “Oh, But You Can Run Your Instance” is dismissive of the issue, There’s literally no option to migrate accounts and expecting average users to deal with this mess is beyond me.

Great point. I get this threat, but do you think closing off would help this? I don’t believe anyone that respects privacy (the type of user that currently uses federated social media) would join meta’s instance. But by defederating, you’re forcing everyone with friends outside this privacy-conscious circle to join meta, and overtime find themselves using it more and more, since it’s more convenient and frankly way more users are there!

By not defederating, you’re giving everyone the option to stay here and have privacy while being able to interact with all their friends, and maybe even convince some of their friends to join! (you would be able to convince them since the underlying protocol is literally the same, but they will gain privacy and won’t see ads, I’d say that’s compelling!)

Exactly! We will always have the option to defederated if meta acts in a bad faith (which will happen, but let’s give them benefit of the doubt!).

no instance ever defederate for any reason

did I say this?!

Also advocating for defederation (censorship) on an instance with 100K users is dictatorship. specially when you can’t prove that said instance is harmful.

Thanks, I get your point and have the same concern. But again, simply defederating will not solve this (in most cases). We need to make a case good enough, so people would willingly join these instances and stop using threads and such. I’m all for freedom, and yes freedom comes with a cost, there might be some bad actors here and there but thinking for rational actors and censoring is not a solution.

But the beauty of Activity Pub is that I can have privacy and interact with them!

Totally get your point. But I think this notion of I’m paying, so I will decide what you can do is not a good mindset. If you’ve started a general instance with tens of thousand of users, you have a responsibility, no one forced you to do this. And with no easy option to migrate accounts, yes this is authoritarian.