Welding. I’m currently putting my woodworking on hold because of other project, so i really can’t start another until i finish the current one and finish whatever i’m trying to finish with my woodworking
Hex bear and Leningrad are both defederated. Just lemmy.ml isn’t which I have blocked. Mostly because it’s annoying ending up on one of their communities and then having them get all upset when you point out basic facts.
Please share with the lemmy.world admins that i don’t want to be defederated with lemmy.ml then too. OP should really ask their own instance admin though, what the hell.
General consensus seems to be that, yes, .ml is problematic, but also it’s not going anywhere due to being the OG lemmy. Too many vital communities are there.
I doubt you'll find many instance admins who aren't already aware of this. But that doesn't mean you can't be vocal about what you think should be fixed.
But maybe you should have a quick look at the instance list before posting. As I said 2/3 or your proposal are already done on lots of instances. And lemmy.ml is just difficult. There are still a lot of big/important communities there (and users) which we haven't yet replaced.
I’ll add to hendrik’s sibling post … it seems you’re relatively new to the fediverse. You may want to get a feel for the place before advocating for such wide reaching actions.
I’m all for expressing your feelings on an issue, but I do wonder if your eagerness is a bit premature. I myself “called for” defederation early in my time on the fediverse … and it was dumb of me.
Since then I’ve come to view most arguments around the idea of defederation suspiciously. There’s usually a bit of personal drama or a shallow opinion or people who want to loudly voice opinions without wanting to put work into making this place better. Usually, if defederation is actually needed, the admins will know before you do and it will be obvious.
All that being said … I’d ask you … what do you think federation and decentralisation is for?
I think what we ultimately need is a healthy and welcoming culture of being nice to each other and engaging with each other with a minimal amount of drama. But that's difficult to pull off and a long process. We aren't there yet but we can make an effort.
Question is: how do we get there? Defederation might be part of that. But it's a bad tool with lots of consequences and side-effects. And ultimately the Fediverse is about connecting people. So disconnecting them will prove to be problematic. However we don't all agree on that. And it's a good thing that the Fediverse is a diverse place. You can sign up at beehaw and they have a strict policy and are happy to defederate with a lot of the network. Maybe OP is better aligned with what they do, than be on lemmy.world
As you say, it’s a very blunt tool and likely only able to create more civil interactions by creating a fairly strong echo chamber.
My perspective on “defederation” conversations, hinted at in my comment above, is that it’s a new “tool”, a new phenomenon etc. Nothing like it existed on reddit for example. And so it’s natural that there will be “unwise”, premature and overzealous calls to use it as though it’s the solution to many of our social media problems, when in reality it’s a relatively subtle tool best used in concert with active and relatively sophisticated community building and organising.
Which all makes sense to me. But what’s a little sad I think is that we have here a pretty good compromise between “absolute free speech is bad” and “censorship is bad” for social media, and instead of embracing it as an ideology we’ve gotten some loud voices eager to use it as a territorial weapon for drawing boundaries around spaces for everyone else without, AFAICT, much the same in the way of actually building spaces that suit people’s needs (though that happens too of course).
If one wants or needs a space that is shut off completely from what one would call “extreme” politics, that’s totally fine. Doesn’t mean all of lemmy world and half or more of the communities on lemmy should be cut off in a big “us and them” statement. Instead … you probably need an instance that caters to that world view. You may need to try to start organising it yourself if it doesn’t exist. Except, that’s harder than posting a “lets defederate” post.
I think I mostly agree. The thing with that, we could solve a lot of the issues with technology. Give users more tools to decide what content and which users to expose themselves to. Maybe hide or collapse content on a user level. But we just have these blunt tools and lots of fine granular tools that would be able to actually tackle the issues are missing on Lemmy. And I think we should revamp some other aspects too to foster good behaviour. I don't see things change substancially, the way it is.
One good thing about the Fediverse is everyone can have their own instance and make their own rules. Theoretically that enables us to have a locked down "safe" space and an anarchic place with freedom of speech next to each other.
In practice most people don't lean towards the extremes, you're right. I want something in between. Not just a*holes and trolls but some meaningful discussions. I wouldn't want to be on a free speech instance. But I also don't want to be in a bubble all day. So something in the middle would be appreciated.
But we just have these blunt tools and lots of fine granular tools that would be able to actually tackle the issues are missing on Lemmy.
Tools could always be better for sure! This is still beta software after all! And the fediverse ecosystem is still finding its feet.
That being said … isn’t subscribing to communities a pretty good tool already? I ask because it strikes me that many here might be talking about the “all” feed. If so, that’d be a case of people just not using the tools given to them (and also an abuse of this system frankly).
And I think we should revamp some other aspects too to foster good behaviour. I don’t see things change substancially, the way it is.
Think I’m totally with you there. The fediverse for me has been a bit of a let down in terms of how much it has just recreated big social platforms without more experimentation. It’s early days and all so I don’t want to be harsh on all the devs. They’ve done great things. But it does feel like some basic revamping could be quite nice.
I don't get that either. The "All" feed ist just a random pile of uninteresting stuff (to me). Lots of news of the day, memes that aren't even funny... I think I would have left Lemmy a long time ago if that had been my experience. I subscribe to the things I want to read. But I took from a few conversations that some people like to browse the "All" feed. I still don't get it.
I kinda lost hope that Lemmy will provide us with a new and different approach to this. The developers are kind of doing their thing. There have been suggestions and new ideas. But usually they don't get implemented. Maybe they're just not that progressive. And a few attempt I read about were really radical in re-defining social media. And people also don't seem to like anarchy and freedom of speech over everything else because that just ends up being a place for trolls. I'd like to have something in the middle. And I think we've already learned a few things in the time Lemmy has been around.
Thanks for the link. I'll have a look at that. Currently I use PieFed. Which as some way to go, but some gread ideas.
Concerning the All-feed: Using that to find new communities would be something I also do. But I heard people just use that instead of subscribing. And one or two people said they then just block all the communities they're not interested in. I guess that works, too. I haven't tried myself.
But I took from a few conversations that some people like to browse the “All” feed. I still don’t get it.
Yea, I was surprised to learn this too. I don’t know the numbers but I’d bet it isn’t insignificant. I learned of the practice from a thread of people recommending to others that they use “All” and block all “the bad instances” to “clean it up” … and I was just kinda shocked at how much of an indifference to the design of the system and all of the community management and moderation all of the mods do not to mention an abuse of the federation mechanics to just block whole instances on a whim.
There have been suggestions and new ideas. But usually they don’t get implemented. Maybe they’re just not that progressive. And a few attempt I read about were really radical in re-defining social media.
If it’s not too much to ask … do you have any descriptions or links or clues to see more of this?
And I think we’ve already learned a few things in the time Lemmy has been around.
Generally, there are quite a few people who feel this way about the fediverse as a whole. The sorts of people who are open to seeing all of this as an opportunity to make some progress on what “big social” did (perhaps like you and I). I’ve connected with a few in my time here (mostly over on mastodon) and the general feeling I’ve picked on is that all of this (incl the protocol itself) so far is a good “first step” or “prototype”, but that moving on to the next step and taking stock of what lessons have been learned could happen soon-ish.
I don't have any good links. There has been an AMA with the developers earlier this year (on lemmy.ml) and I asked some questions regarding the development process and the direction of the project (and finances). I don't have the link available, since I switched instances in the meantime.
And I followed the Github issues for some time. Usually you get an idea about how developers handle things by looking at their interaction with the community. There are some requests from last summer which I think would be worth looking into, but the devs say they don't have the manpower. Same applies to several UI bugs. They're still pretty much untouched as development focuses on the backend. And I've heard from people that the maintainers aren't always happy with contributions. Which I think isn't great because if you have an open source project along with a community, and then people try to engage but get disappointed because their day worth of coding is wasted and the PR denied... That isn't going to foster a healthy community. I'm not sure if they're working towards a different vision of the project, or manpower is that scarce. I mean they have 2 or 3 people working fulltime on Lemmy and they get paid a salary. I think we discussed that in the AMA. They definitely don't get rich and pay isn't what a big company would pay.
And there was something with the instance admins that needs improvement. I'm not sure what that was. Either image moderation or resource usage. (Or both.) Because admins need to abide by the law and pay attention to what's uploaded (ideally without messing with the database manually) and I think they did some database performance improvements in the last few releases. I'm not sure. Rust should be fairly efficient. With databases you need to pay attention to what you're doing. But I don't know all the used frameworks. I'm just speculating here.
So... I really don't have a link. I just occasionally read what people post here and want. And I sometimes follow the development.
And the fediverse as a whole... I don't think ActivityPub is very efficient. The polling and simple design is compelling, but it's not very performant. And it has some issues with caching etc. Also people want extensions and functionality that is well-defined and interoperable. But AP is just a well-defined core. And I think not even voting is part of that standard and just something people kind of agreed on. Which is problematic. Lots of normal stuff in Mastodon, Lemmy, etc isn't really part of the standard. And I'm not sure if they release a new revision at some point. I think the current revision is a bit older as of now. I think we need that because the whole Fediverse is about interoperability.
Yea, generally fediverse projects have moved slowly. Mastodon has basically the same problems AFAICT despite being bigger and wealthier.
In a way I’ve been wondering if the fediverse is a kind of trial run for modern open source culture and what it can do other than packages for specific languages without the sponsorship of big corps. So far, it’s been really cool and super easy to take for granted. But also revealing I think in how hard it is to get things going when people need to make a living and everyone expects the internet to be free.
The performance implications of the protocol have been an elephant in the room for sure. I’ve never seen anyone do any sort of analysis.
And its quality as a foundation for a federated ecosystem seem definitely questionable. Especially as its main champion, Evan, seems super defensive about it and the idea of upgrading it. Sadly, it seems they’re an older tech person and see the protocol as their life’s work. So any proposal for starting again just runs into resistance. That there’s a weird cult around the protocol doesn’t help either.
As for the lemmy devs being antagonistic to contributions. I’ve heard that too but am suspicious. I’ve certainly seen 3rd party contributions go through. The whole image deletion episode was bad though. They even admitted to it to some extent.
I used to think they were way too “cranky” … but I’ve actually come around to the idea they push about not being too demanding of open source devs. It’s a serious issue with burnout being real and sustainability being vital for the fediverse. I was an early firefish user and saw that whole team, instance and project implode from the inside.
Would the devs be better at community management with proper salaries and community support and donations? Prob not! But some form of community manager could probably go far (even now if anyone is up for it) which seems viable if the support base got bigger.
I’m personally hoping to try to contribute by sometime this year, so I guess I’ll see how it goes and let you know if you like!
With the other group based platforms coming along (piefed and nodebb and maybe sub links) I’m hoping it becomes a richer part of the fediverse.
Thanks for the comprehensive comments. I didn't even know the whole backstory behind ActivityPub. I always just took it for granted. I think we agree that there are quite some issues that are technical in nature. I think we'd need so solve a few of those before we can think about growing the Fediverse substantially. It's certainly not easy. But adding drama also doesn't help. I'm quite pisitive about the Fediverse. At least in the mid to long term. Maybe a bit competition and new projects will help add a few new ideas.
Always happy to chat about the fediverse … even when I’m critical it’s out of optimism for its future and promise.
On the point of competition … what’s kinda interesting is that for some people “fediverse” is now a broad term that encompasses BlueSky with their ATP protocol and Nostr and farcaster with their more crypto based protocols. So there’s certainly some strange mix of things at the moment.
Yea … I can’t shake the feeling that there many who have a kinda “echo chamber” instinct with their idea of what a platform like this is for. Which I get. They want it to be a nice doom scroll I guess.
But I wonder if there should be a real counter to that instinct and if it should be given a clearer form and identity. My rant about the value of federation as an ideology for better social media is maybe a possibility.
But the point is that there are many I think who aren’t on board with trigger happy defederstion (the voting on this post is an indication) but don’t get much of an opportunity to make themselves clear.
Agree to disagree. If the internet was an empty space with only a few posts, I'd understand. But it's filled with lots of stuff. And every shitty interaction I have, actively takes away time from my day. Time I could spend reading something nice and positive, actually interacting with people, learning something or doing something productive like maintaining my server or coding. I think it's a waste. And worse than that, it also affects my mood and drives us further apart. And it's not healthy. Every interaction defines the atmosphere of this place. Good and bad ones. The whole atmosphere becomes toxic if a certain amount of interaction is bad and people always have to expect that happening. I'll certainly stop giving (good) advice if there is a 40% chance that I get yelled at. And I think we have to guide and steer to the correct destination and do that early. And there is precedent. We have had several attempts at re-defining social media. Once trolls and negativity dominate, the places usually die over the course of a few months or years.
Lemmy.ml federates with hexbear and grad. As a world user I don’t see hexbear and grad because world blocks them thankfully. Unless you are on server X what server X blocks in no way impacts what you see. So they need to petition their local admin.
That said. I think the only reason world still federates with lemmy.ml. is that so many open source projects communities are still there. They need to get moved off to proper instances like KDE or Mozilla have done. Or we need to start a dedicated instance for it.
I mean … why? That’s a lot of work and carving up the network … for what?
How about moving communities off of lemmy world onto proper decentralised instances? Cuz it’s a real problem that world people are happy to defederate and cut plenty of users off from their communities. That maybe they don’t appreciate the value of decentralisation and slowly pushing a federated system into merely a monolithic Reddit alternative. That maybe they’re too happy to shape the network into a reflection of their mainstream politics however much it unconvinced others across the network (which is perhaps a very spec thing to do?)
Which, BTW, lemmy ml has never done … they federate widely, have never called for defederstion from lemmy world (interesting that world would defederate first!) and never wanted to be the biggest instance despite they easily could have been.
Seems like maybe some basic moderation at the community level is all you’d need. Maybe some better tools could help … in which case spell out what that’d look like.
Moving whole communities because you don’t like some people … is a lot … and quite rich for someone on world. Maybe those communities are happy where they are (as I’m sure those on world are) and building and organising a better more flexible network is the answer rather than all of us trying to push it into the shape we want.
I've had a look at it and it's not as bad as it looks. Lot's of websites on that list aren't around anymore. Others are anime or hentai stuff which might be questionable at times. So from reading the list I thought the fediverse is full of nazis, extremists, trolls and loli pictures. But when doing the research it's just a tiny minority. Those pedos exist, though. But the blocking works.
The existence of a list of linked, and a list of blocked, implies three, possibly four independent states of “instance relationship”.
Can someone who understands it deeply please explain to me? What is the relationship between a “linked” instance and a “blocked” instance, and how does that relate to “defederated”?
Does federation require active configuration from one instance to another? Or is federated the default relationship when no config data exists?
Also ban talking on the street, public transport, and trees. All of these can be very noisy, and I can’t stand it! Oh and bikes too, their bells are very infuriating, especially when it’s bad and rings all the time… and better not let your kids play in the front of the yard!
Seriously, I have seen loud motors, but haven’t any loud scooters. Which one do you think is loud?
In my experience cars and newborns are louder, not by a little margin, just to give a few examples.
That’s why I said compared to their speed. I don’t know any brands or example models, all of them are obnoxiously loud and driven by simple minded fools imho. Cars make relatively little noise, and newborns and trees do not belong in this comparison in my opinion.
No worries, it appears that most of the world uses the word “scooter” differently than we do in the Netherlands :-) with your definition of scooter I agree that my statement was ridiculous haha.
Yeah, I think many people thought you were talking about those electric scooters, which are, well pretty damn silent and good to make cities less car focused (like in the US). I mean things like this.
Yeah it’s my bad as apparently most of the world uses the word differently :-) I’m a big fan of electric vehicles, both the noise and pollution are reduced which is great!
If racing to the bottom was a competition, you’d still be second behind Yugthos and their army of Canadian-based hot-takes. The only thing you’re winning is second place, always.
It’s even better when you break the name down kwarizam is where he’s from and Muhammad is a common first name. It’s like saying Johnny English (or may be Jean Francois) invented calculus in 10-diggity-dig
Small print, excessive legalese and outright deceptive language in ads, agreements and such. All the “free” (not really free) trials, “unlimited” (not really unlimited) plans, “best value” (according to the producer and their mum) deals and shit like that.
There really should be a law prohibiting that - if reading through terms and conditions for using a damn website or a toothbrush or whatever requires 4 hours of free time, a magnifyibg glass and degree in law, such t&cs should be illegal. Same for disclaimers and such in ads - any 4pt text displayed for 2 seconds on screen should automatically result in a massive fine.
It’s called a federation. Its design is intended to give people options. To provide a diverse network of content that people can navigate as they see fit.
The internet can naturally do a bad job of facilitating good and robust conversations.
Federation is the only cure I’ve seen for social media … where separate but connected and navigable spaces can co-exist, enabling a discourse through contrasting biases and perspectives, for those willing to use the content that way.
Can’t stand a community or instance? Don’t subscribe. Or unsubscribe or block.
Instance defederation is an extreme action and requires extreme justification IMO. It reduces the size of the network and the value of the ecosystem. Especially for lemmy world’s size … it has a responsibility to support the network.
What some loud people find unacceptable is likely interesting to some quiet others.
Differing political “sides” or perspectives isn’t enough. Politics isn’t everything for everyone. Moreover, it’s exactly the domain in which a diverse array of content is most valuable and important … because no one has all the answers!
Authoritarians are authoritarian first. Everything else is a very distant second. I really hate when people call Marxist leninists/tankies fascist. They do a lot of the same things but there are distinct differences which makes one different from the other.
I think with the heavy resurgence of fascist politics around the globe right now. A lot of people sort of just learned the term Fascism and just randomly apply it to things it shouldn’t be. The truth is Marxist leninists are to tankies what Liberals are to fascism. And the funny thing is both groups will usually downvote that heavily LOL. Despite it being a basic fact of their general authoritarian Behavior.
Can’t stand a community or instance? Don’t subscribe. Or unsubscribe or block.
I agree that defederations should not be done lightly, but I just want to point out that “just block” is not a foolproof strategy. An instance block on Lemmy functions like blocking all communities, so you will still see comments from that instance on other posts. Also, the blocked instance will still influence your feed via their votes.
it has a responsibility to support the network
Well, on the other hand it also has a responsibility to provide a reasonably well-moderated space that doesn’t include bigots or what’s worse.
To be clear, I am not advocating for or against defederation of lemmy.ml, just want to add some nuance to this.
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