In the graph above I’ve arranged the 28 Theeadiverse instances with at least 200 monthly active users (MAU)—orange instances running Lemmy, green Piefed, and red Mbin—on the basis of which instances they defederate.
I sourced the latest MAU figures from Fediverse Observer, with adjustments made to the totals for Piefed (due to undercounting by outdated instances, as noted here; I used @Vicinus@piefed.zip’s suggested estimate of 7,200 Piefed users) and Mbin (due to tardigram.com having a duplicate listing).
After adjustments, there are an estimated 43,287 monthly active Threadiverse users (35,184+7,200+903), of whom 87.84% are on the 28 largest instances.
Defederation data was sourced from Federation Checker. The tool doesn’t support Mbin instances, so I left fedia.io in its own category. If any defederations are missing, feel free to let me know. Ideally such a chart should also include community blocks to better illustrate which instances have to what, but that data doesn’t appear to be as easily searchable.
I also noticed cases of some instances being listed as being defederated by another instance, despite not appearing on the defederation list for that instance (i.e. reddthat.com and lemmygrad.ml are listed as being mutually blocked, despite neither having the other on their block lists). In testing that federation, I noticed that !wholesome@reddthat.com did not federate to Lemmygrad while !memes@reddthat.com did, so clarification on that matter would be helpful.
While I’ll update my generalized chart as needed to correct errors, perhaps at some point an automated federation mapping tool similar to the one feddit.de formerly hosted could be developed to more completely illustrate instance federation.
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Wow, infosec.pub is based!
What’s with feddit.org?
The admins of feddit.org are afraid of german police coming for their servers and therefore ban content that is possibly illegal in germany quite liberally. Since german courts are sometimes weird this includes some Pro-Palestine content that could be interpreted as Anti-Israel (e.g. the chant “From the river to the sea…”). That topic in particular pissed of the dbzero community which then defereated feddit.org for being “Zionists”.
DACH under feddit.org removed my German news article on Israel. Apparently even German state media is anti-semitic.
When I posted the same article on German language reddit I got a message that my content had been deemed inapropriate at least.
?
According to the modlog the article was simply moved to !nahost@feddit.org as you can see here
Also The Guardian is not german state media
You’re right. I had the article confused with an NDR one I posted a few months back on the other site when it was new. Where can I see the modlog? Sync app didn’t show anything, it just went to the crosspost.
Yea, some apps don’t support showing the modlog. You can alternatively just go through the web-ui like here
so ban all discussions about palestine then instead of policing Palestinians voice while letting zionists spread all kind of propaganda in your instance
I mean, it is kinda. Anticipatory obedience makes you complicit.
Yup. Anticipatory obedience isn’t the way to go!
Uhm, this was translated right? “vorauseilender Gehorsam”
Well, if you have to personally liable for the shit a bunch of internet strangers say, you might think differently. That is one boon of being a mega-corp. You are somewhat immune to SLAPP-lawsuits and the like.
There are a lot of threads here about this. Feddit.org wants to keep in line with local laws in their jurisdiction, dbzero thinks that this is a pro-zionist stand and genocide-denial.
If feddit.org was not Zionist they would remove justification for Zionism a genocidal supremacist ideology
Come to think of it:
I still remember when Lemmy was fairly new. Before $20M for the client API killed off all third-party Reddit apps, enshittifying Reddit to such a point that people left for the Threadiverse in droves in protest (and looking for something that didn’t require either Reddit’s Web interface or the official Reddit app). When /kbin was still experimental (as opposed to dead), when Mbin and PieFed didn’t exist yet, but Lotide still did (although it was more or less a zombie).
Back then, federation was optional on Lemmy. As in, Lemmy servers weren’t federated with anything by default. The admins had to manually add every single last Fediverse server, be it Lemmy, be it /kbin, be it something else, to an allowlist to allow it to federate with their server.
Lemmy servers actually had public lists of servers they federated with (as opposed to lists of servers they had defederated, available on third-party websites).
Not being federated with any given Lemmy server was the default back in the day. Most Fediverse servers were defederated from Lemmy servers because the admins of the Lemmy servers simply didn’t know that they existed. If you were lucky, then the admins occasionally checked their server logs, discovered Fediverse servers that they had never heard about, checked them and then added them to the list.
It was only a while later that a new Lemmy version switched to federating by default, simply because the above was tedious and impractical.
As others informed me, Hexbear still uses the allowlist system. While it seems like they’re pretty good about adding instances that don’t defederate them to their whitelist, six instances with over 50 MAU that don’t defederate them are effectively defederated from them due to not being on their whitelist.
https://files.catbox.moe/218n2l.svg
Looks like something is going wrong with the Lemmy media proxy.
Replaced the catbox link with a PNG upload for compatibility purposes, so hopefully it displays better now.
Does it open with the cached version from my instance?
That link does open.
This is cool, thanks!
I say, I really don’t get why so many people stay over on Reddit.
This might be a micro version of the actual future internet, where we walk away from the global model and split it into ideological countries who believe the best way forward is to stop talking to the other group.
We’ve come a long way from drawing artificial lines on maps.
I say, I really don’t get why so many people stay over on Reddit.
This place fuckin sucks man? It’s pretty much reddit for left wing progressives who specifically care about left wing American* politics, linux, and not much else
We are not interested in you recommending similar toxic people, as you support genocide in Palestine
You can always post eco-fascist Australian memes if that’s more your thing
@Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz this is what I mean, cunts everywhere in this place, why would I encourage anyone to come here?
Banned 1 day for being disrespectful. Next one is a perma.
Unfortunately there are too many people here who would rather be brash and rude at the hint of any disagreement, rather than discussing civilly and promoting a healthy community that is not an echo chamber.
My best advice is to just block people who you find rude to make the remainder slightly less rude on average.
deleted by creator
I also don’t think the Threadiverse should be an echo chamber, nor do I think that user deserved a temp ban for expressing their frustration with it. Ultimately, fewer defederations, more acceptance of differing opinions, and being welcoming of users who aren’t interested in politics are the primary viable means for the platform to grow beyond being a niche echo chamber.
Ultimately, fewer defederations, more acceptance of differing opinions, and being welcoming of users who aren’t interested in politics
The problem is those two are strongly tied to the idea that the people who come here have to be respectful enough. The people who first populated these places did it to escape from things like capitalism, right-wing nutjobs and the like; saying only “oh we have to be more accepting of difering opinions” basically puts the blame on the victim.
As for the subjects that are not politics, we have cats and beans. That should suffice.
I’m a cunt? I’m just encouraging you to follow your dreams.
You can even post anti-linux memes with that one other guy.
That’s slander!
We also like Star Trek!
While it would be nice if there were more activity, when the alternative is the ever-enshittifying Reddit, our best option is to contribute what we can here, be as welcoming as possible to new users, and block any content that isn’t interesting to achieve a personalized feed of one’s preferred content.
This might be a micro version of the actual future internet, where we walk away from the global model and split it into ideological countries who believe the best way forward is to stop talking to the other group.
Reminds me of the world depicted in The Diamond Age. The setting is perhaps our world a few decades in the future, where the role of countries has faded and instead life is organised via fragmented, extremely diverse patchwork of phyles based on ethnic or ideological affiliation, but entirely irrespective of where they geographically are (a phyle can operate in many different locations). These phyles interact via a deeply capitalistic Common Economic Protocol, where the only “human right” that matters is harm to an individual’s ability for economic productivity.
The fediverse is great if you fall into the like 5 interests that are pretty well represented here.
But if the communities you wanna engage with aren’t really active enough for potential posters to not just forget they exist, or you don’t really want to be on a platform where 75% of the front page is news or memes about the state of the world politically, its not neccisarily a great replacement to reddit
For me it happens to cover enough of my bases, but I can get why it wouldn’t for many people.
I’ve said this a number of times over the past couple days, but if there’s an instance for mirroring subreddits, where niche subreddits that don’t have an equivalent here yet basically get a carbon copy and a repost bot to stock them with relevant stuff from over there, that could fill in some of those gaps and make the fediverse a more attractive alternative.
It won’t have the same level of engagement right away, but it will provide a place for that engagement to occur, and as more people start using it it will create a network effect. As things stand now, we’re missing a lot of those niche communities.
Someone explained that that exists and hasnt connected with people, but I think a big part of why it hasnt is that theres no real social drive to comment or engage with something if theres zero chance the poster might see it. It kinda feels like you’re just speaking into the void, or talking to yourself
Thats how I feel about it at least 🤷🏻♂️ if a human reposts stuff at least you can chat with the reposter about it, if its the kind of post where that makes sense. If the post is a “hey look at this thing I did”, the reposter can’t really say how it went or discuss the experience
That makes sense. I guess it would mainly only work for posts linking to articles, but we already have that honestly
Yeah. Honestly I feel like if it were to be helpful the best application would probably be a mixed one, where a mod still uses and checks the inbox on the not account. So only partially automated, and only makes up some of the posted content
And I think it’d probably also work best if the mod picked what was to cross post and it could all just be put into a que, rather than just cross posting anything and everything. That way they can select stuff that would make sense to post even if they aren’t the originator: memes, articles, info-posts/guides, etc.
It’d still be less work than manually finding a ton of stuff to post, but still be much more intentional and interactive feeling.
Yeah, that makes sense. I like that idea
Thanks! ☺️
Hope you have a lovely day! ❤️
There is an instance like that - lemmit.online. It’s been going for three years and it’s still a ghost town.
Ah, I see. Yeah, it is a ghost town…
This approach is honestly a non-starter. It lacks organic engagement, and most of the posts from people who do this have no comments or very few. It also tends to end up with one person flooding with a bunch of shit they didn’t read. Personally, I usually block this as meaningless attention seeking, and I’m sure I’m not alone.
Just like in real life, one must grow and sometimes create the communities they want to be apart of.
While thats true, if my friend whose biggest interests are science informed dog training and animal genetics joins the threadiverse there are not enough people here who genuinely really care about those subjects to actually sustain any of the social connection she’s looking for around them.
If my friend who’s super into basketball and competitive league of legends join she’d have at least a couple people to talk to, but its fundamentally not what she’s looking for to talk to exactly 3 other people who care about the thing she’s into.
I try to remember that as much as I love the fediverse and feel at home here, it has real limitations for lots of people, and its okay if its not in a state they can go enjoy very easily. This is a space that I am passionate about and want to contribute to. I don’t expect everyone to do labor to invest in a space that isnt their passion just to chat with folks when they have the ability to chat with folks somewhere else, even if that place has bigger picture downsides or harms associated with it.
Difficult when people here only like 5 things and they shun everything that is not those 5 things.
It really is pretty dead outside the main subjects. I have noone to talk about the latest episode of My Adventures with Superman. Did they now just leave the other universe with Clark dead? That sucks.
I do want to watch that. It’s in my list of shows to watch one the first season is done. I normally don’t follow western animation or comics, but he’s so derpy I think it’ll be endearing enough for me to enjoy.
I don’t know if we’re talking about the same show. MAWS is in its 3rd season now. It has been good so far in my opinion.
Maybe try making a post on one of the movies or shows comms (I’m not familiar with it and don’t know if its a movie or a show. Though you can also just post where people are.)
c/casual_conversations can also be a place to chat
I think in some cases on the threadiverse communities just have to be more catchall, because there aren’t enough people to congregate around a more specific topic. But there may be other people out there who would love to chat about that with you, even if there aren’t enough for a specific community for the show
(Apologies if youve already tried this, I just had the problem solving thought and figured I’d share. If its not helpful thats okay :)
You can still choose one that talks to everybody else. In fact, this graphic might be a nice tool for new users who want advice beyond “Just choose any instance, it doesn’t matter” or “Just use lemmy.world”.
I can understand people staying on Reddit more than those staying on Twitter to be honest.
At least spez hasn’t gone full nazi yet, or provided tools for generating pedophilia.
Both of which people seem to be perfectly fine with. So it doesn’t surprise me they’re fine with Reddit too.
At least spez hasn’t gone full nazi yet
citation needed
Wouldn’t it make more sense to indicate federation with an arrow and defederation with no arrow?
Interesting that so many instances have defederated from fedinsfw.app. What’s that about?
Federating nsfw can bear legal issues. Although I believe Feddit.UK has entirely disabled access to NSFW
Wouldn’t it make more sense to indicate federation with an arrow and defederation with no arrow?
Unless an instance chooses to defederate from another, everything is federated by default; indicating it with arrows would result in a very messy graph.
Interesting that so many instances have defederated from fedinsfw.app. What’s that about?
Fedinsfw.app, like lemmynsfw.com before it, is an instance dedicated to hosting NSFW content. As such content can be off putting for new users, and only a subset of users are interested in seeing it, some instances choose to defederate from instances dedicated to it. While I’m broadly against defederation that results in a fractured Threadiverse, in this case doing so is probably more helpful in terms of new user retention than it is harmful (users can easily have separate accounts on SFW and NSFW instances, or choose an instance that specifically maintains federation with both).
Unless an instance chooses to defederate from another, everything is federated by default
This is not always true, as Hexbear shows. Whether an instance defaults to federation or defederation is an admin setting.
I realized that afterwards as people replied; in reviewing all instances with at least 50 MAU, I found that while Hexbear is the main user of the whitelist system, lemmynsfw now also uses it for exclusive federation with fedinsfw.
Lemmy.sinistraverso.org has it enabled, but doesn’t have any instances on the list, so it doesn’t seem to do anything in its case.
feddit.org has a rule against porn in general, so it would make no sense to federate with them given that that’s what their focus is
Do sharing a circle mean degenerated or federated?
Arrows mean defederated. Circles mean everything within that circle is defederated from the target instance. (It took me a while to figure that out.)
Sorry for the confusion; I’ll try to make it clearer next time.
It’s actually impressively clear, I did not think it would be possible to represent all of the details in such a simple graphic. Very nicely done. But I guess anything can be improved with a bit of iteration.
It’s pretty intuitive once you get the idea, so I don’t think the map by itself is bad. Maybe just needed an extra explanation about the encircled instances.
yaaasss feddit.uk #5 spot come on lads get in
I thought the % underneath was the number of users who couldn’t see that instance, but I guess it’s % of the active fediverse users?
Yes; the percentage underneath an instance is its proportion of the overall Threadiverse userbase. The percentages on the large arrows are the sum of the userbases within the associated box, indicating the extent to which an instance is defederated (somewhat of an underestimation, given that 12% of users are unaccounted for).
Damn, I thought blahaj would have more defederation. Place is just as toxic as hexbear.
Blahaj are very reasonable and nice.
The only person who would think that is someone who is equally toxic.
Awww, thanks!
I get the same impression, generally chill people.
I could have sworn that hexbear defederated from jlai.lu. there was a whole spat between our instances a while back.
As someone informed me, Hexbear is unique in that most of its “defederations” are just instances that aren’t on its approval list. Jlai.lu doesn’t defederate Hexbear itself, but isn’t on the approval list, so I guess that’s effectively a defederation; I’ll adjust the next version of the chart to account for that.
This looks like a job for… The Defedestrator
The beehaw.org/sh.itjust.works defederation is really one-way. Beehaw defederated from us after some exceptionally bad trolls were operating from sh.itjust.works in 2023. IIRC, they requested that we also defederate from them to really make sure the split was made. We honored their request.
We would happily reconnect if Beehaw decided they want to federate with us again. If not, then that’s fine; they have a right to associate with whomever they like.
I believe infosec.pub temporarily defederated from us around the same time for the same reason. It was a rough time.
I’ll adjust the graph by the next version to account for it as an exception.
If you want to complicate the graph further, I believe hexbear federates using an allow list. Blahaj, lemmy.ca, and sh.itjust.works are not on the allow list, so they are effectively defederated. I haven’t looked further to see which other large instances may be affected.
In most cases that a major instance isn’t on the Hexbear allow list, it seems to be an instance that blocks Hexbear already anyhow, so the current layout is sufficient for that. An exception seems to be jlai.lu, which does not block Hexbear yet isn’t on the approved list. In such a case, would the two instances still effectively be defederated?
Kinda eye-opening, thx for making the chart. I hadn’t realized it had gotten this bad. In my opinion, defederation should only ever be used to combat spam, not because of ideological differences or disputes between individuals.
One of the most common tips for people looking to switch over from Reddit has been that the instance you choose doesn’t really matter. But it clearly does. Choose the “wrong” instance and you may suddenly find yourself cut off from a sizable portion of other users because someone else decided they know better than you what you should and shouldn’t see.
I’m lucky to be on an instance that has “only” defederated one instance in this chart (lemmygrad.ml). I don’t really follow the drama around here, so I have no idea why that instance is banned. All I see is that there are 558 active users I’ll never be able to interact with just because someone I don’t personally know (my instance admin) made that decision at some point.
Wasn’t there just a big drama because some app developer built-in their own opinionated blocklist into their app or something? How is this any different?
My point being, why not leave these kinds of drastic decisions to individual users, who can and should block whoever they want, instead of dividing threadiverse into silos at the instance level?
This is what organic growth looks like. It spreads in fits and starts, bits of it clump together and pile up, pieces of it separate and take on life of their own or die. When part of it rots (hexbear) the larger organism cuts it off to limit the spread of disease.
Lemmy (and more generally, ActivityPub) is growing, not like a rose bush, but like a field of grass. Some pieces of it are blooming, some pieces of it are dying, some pieces are adapting to different environments, but the spread is inexorable and the horizon unlimited.
If you want to see what the field is like on the other side of that hill, well it won’t just come to you, you’ll have to get up and go to it.
Actually it was mostly hexbear to initiate defederations. Hexbear has an allowlist of federated communities instead of a denylist and which is why it doesn’t show up in the graph. The only instance to initiate defederation that I’m aware of is lemmy.world’s “pre-emptive defederation as a last resort”.
Lemmygrad.ml is a Marxist-Leninist instance. The users are very chill there normally, so the reason for defederation is ideological.
Ha! Haha! Hahahahaha! Good one!
Have you visited Lemmygrad.ml? Just click on some of the threads, there’s much less hostility than most Lemmy.world threads. The idea that the commies on Grad are bloodthirsty beasts or something is more a consequence of their wide defederation causing defederated instances to project their imagination, not an actual analysis of how they act.
I’m sure they’re all patting each other’s backs there. But I’ve interacted with them elsewhere and when they are exposed to anything but straight tankie bootlicking they turn vicious. Not a single decent interaction, and I’ve had several.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that communists will generally oppose anticommunist viewpoints, and certainly critique non-communist views. Communists also tend to be political activists, so we also care quite a lot, which can often spill out into heated exchanges. This isn’t unique to communists, though, liberals are the same way for views they don’t align with. Therefore, the biggest difference and the reason for defederation is ideological, after all, irreconcilable political differences.
Ideological differences don’t explain the brigading, dogpiling, constant trolling, bad faith arguments. There are only so many times an instance admin is willing to ban single users from a place until they get fed up with a culture of abuse and cut ties with the whole lot.
I haven’t seen Lemmygrad brigading, trolling, or arguing in bad-faith. Active users going into active threads organically isn’t the same as brigading, which is typically associated with coordinated targeting. This can seem like “dogpiling” in practice, but again, this same behavior is exhibited by non-communists, same with what can be perceived as trolling or bad-faith arguments (and anecdotally I see far more of that on instances that aren’t predominantly leftist).
In the end, it’s ideology, not specific traits, as ideological differences cause not just communists but non-communists to behave in similar confrontational manners. Lemmygrad.ml aren’t especially bad-faith, trolling, etc, just like Lemmy.world isn’t. Both have distinct ideological identities and this difference caused friction.
Note that defederations with smaller instances (representing 12% of users) are not represented here, so there are even more defederations than what is listed here. Hopefully that will come across better with more data in the next version of the graph.
As requiring new users to implement multiple blocks off the bat can be a big ask for those still on the fence about leaving Reddit, defederating known NSFW, troll, and tankie instances can improve new user retention. For those who prefer more hands-off moderation practices, specific instances can cater to them, but I think a more tailored experience is better for users arriving from Reddit.
I think the main issue is that this isn’t communicated clearly. Most people joining a random instance listed on join-lemmy.org won’t know what defederation means and they have no way of knowing that by choosing that particular instance they’ll be cut off from a certain number of other users.
I’m not so sure, I’d rather have a prepopulated blocklist that I can further configure myself, as opposed to instance level blocks that I can’t reverse.
I’m not so sure, I’d rather have a prepopulated blocklist that I can further configure myself, as opposed to instance level blocks that I can’t reverse.
Exactly, same here, as long as the defederation isn’t for legal reasons, which I would understand. This is the approach that my instance (lemmy.zip) takes.
As requiring new users to implement multiple blocks off the bat can be a big ask for those still on the fence about leaving Reddit, defederating known NSFW, troll, and tankie instances can improve new user retention. For those who prefer more hands-off moderation practices, specific instances can cater to them, but I think a more tailored experience is better for users arriving from Reddit.
There’s a better approach for this, which is the one lemmy.zip takes: instead of defederating major but controversial instances for politics (as opposed to legal issues, which I completely understand), new user accounts have those instances blocked by default (user-level block). Problem solved. Newbies don’t see posts that may scare them (oh no, communism!), but they can choose to see them if they wish.
Good point 👍
Thanks 👍
Idk, that is exactly how lemmy.zip does it. Fairly straight forward if you ask me.
They were advocating for instances defederating other controversial, but major instances. The approach lemmy.zip takes is to default block those, but each user can remove those blocks if they wish.
Many fantastic instances do exactly that.
But in answer to your question, you may want to research The Intolerance Paradox. In short, when people refuse to follow the rules it kinda becomes spam. Even if you were okay with CSAM or pictures of pigs actively showing the poop falling out of their anuses (sadly, I bet you think I am being hyperbolic here? nope, this is kinda Hexbear’s major schtick), the fact remains that it scares away newcomers.
I will note that if you self-host your own instance then you have perfect control over every aspect of your experience, being able to fine-tune it to perfectly suit your precise needs. Otherwise you will want to choose an instance provider that aligns with whatever your needs are. Some people will choose one of the instances that defederates from almost nothing, while others actually want an experience that is more what they are used to and would expect coming over from the overly bot-modded Reddit, i.e. they want (even outright demand) that censorship be done for them.
This is why the instance pickers need to carefully explain what each instance is about, since there is not just one audience with a single set of needs & expectations.
Yeah, I get your argument, and obviously it’s good to have instances with different federation policies. It’s just that when big instances like the ones in this chart start swinging the defederation hammer around, I worry that some (or many) users end up disconnected from users and communities without ever realizing it or agreeing with the decision.
Have you ever tried to organize a fun game night with friends but two of them just can’t get along, ruining the whole thing? That’s kinda the feeling I get from this.
Okay but… have you ever tried to force your group to get together despite those two being unable to get along? e.g. Russia vs. Ukraine? China vs. Taiwan? Israel vs. Palestine? USA vs. a neighbor with oil?
Whether one side (e.g. Ukraine) can “get along with” the other side there (e.g. Russia) depends a LOT on whether they are able to agree to follow some shared rules (e.g. to not murder the other side). These are not mere political differences in the sense of left vs. right, but rather those who are proud to remain ungovernable (while seemingly not understanding what that phrase originally was intended to mean) vs. those who would rather nope out entirely than exist side-by-side with them.
Please also note that Lemmy’s block tools are so misleadingly misnamed as to be almost worthy of the moniker of calling it disinformation. What “blocking an instance” does is to:
- Mute communities on that instance from the user, preventing discoverability and blocking that content from showing in your personal feed, including when browsing All
What that so-called “blocking” does NOT do:
- Hide content from those users submitted to communities on remote instances
- Prevent those users from being able to reply to, famously including vote brigading on, your own content
- Prevent those users from sending you DMs, which at first were not allowed to trigger notifications, but the Lemmy devs reversed that decision and now these “blocked users” can trigger notifications - which bc of the “style” preferred by people on those instances, can continue for WEEKS and WEEKS after you so much as reply to a post that you encountered on All, without having read the sidebar and so not knowing that this style differs from what you are used to
Besides, even if insurance blocking actually worked, it would still do nothing to not showcase the content for an anonymous guest account or a newly created account, i.e. it does nothing to help others deal with “the situation”, only yourself. Which is especially notable when people access Lemmy’s content from apps like Voyager that by default does not show the instance name, thereby treating all content from all instances as being equal. However, I would argue that e.g. Poland does not fear attack from all nations equally - does Poland want to be on guard against Taiwan? Or North or South Korea? What about Russia?
Defederation is a blunt tool, but is virtually the only one offered by the Lemmy devs. When the software is made more robust to offer some other alternative… then this issue can be revisited at that time.
Also, you are free at any to self-host your own instance. But to tell Ukraine and Russia that they must get along… or else what? I am saying that I reject the underlying premise of your argument. “People getting along” should not be the ultimate goal of the Threadiverse. A better goal IMHO would be “People enjoying their experiences while here”. Which for many, means blocking Hexbear - and yes, for some it means NOT blocking it - and therefore since the answer is neither a clear yay or nay, we are forced into preaching the controversy for every new potential member, even though that very complexity itself is often what drives others away.
Though PieFed.zip offers an intriguing and innovative compromise: upon joining the instance a user block is placed upon the Hexbear and lemmygrad instances, and a message sent to the new user about how to remove or place such blocks. This makes federation with those highly controversial instances as opt-in, as opposed to opt-out or impossible to block or not block. That’s really neat! However, that delves into a whole other can of worms on how PieFed instance blocks have problems - namely that people on the receiving end can still reply to them, though only people on the same originating instance will see those replies (or perhaps it’s worse and everyone using Lemmy will see them while everyone using PieFed will not? or perhaps something else altogether?). Also this in turn opens up an entirely new rabbit hole on top of that, where Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) would need to agree on a set of shared practices…
In short, the technology of the Threadiverse is still quite primitive in so very many ways, despite the upcoming release of Lemmy vs. 1.0. Yes defederation is a very blunt instrument, but it’s all that we have been given to wield for the most part. But the alternative IMHO would be far worse, being forced into allowing bullies to thrive. The Paradox of Intolerance is ironic, but very real: allowing the intolerant to exist in your space, worse yet platforming and even promoting them, means that you yourself are intolerant. Fences between neighbors is the only hope the Threadiverse even has of surviving. Yes you are allowed to be sad at that fact, but it remains true nonetheless. Move past your sadness, to get to what must be done to thrive and move forward in a positive direction?
e.g. learn Rust and contribute to the code development of Lemmy!? Unfortunately, merely donating money is unlikely to help, as much of those funds go into the moderation and instance maintenance costs of the “highly controversial” Lemmy.ml, and the devs have refused to open a way to provide funding for the former independently of the latter. Or learn Python and contribute to development of PieFed? It likely won’t help with interoperability between PieFed vs. Lemmy, and both require investments of several years, but if you want to help then there is no better way. So long as the technology remains as primitive as it is now, these kinds of blunt instruments are all that are available to us - someone would need to invest the effort to provide better.
TLDR: there are extremely good reasons why things are as they are now.
Thank you for taking the time to explain your point of view in such detail. It’s not every day that a Lemmy comment makes me really think or maybe even change my opinion a bit :)
I actually agree with almost everything you wrote. If I were unlucky enough to be friends with both Russia and Ukraine, then sure, that game night would be very unlikely to happen. For science tho, I decided to check what the hell people on Hexbear and Lemmygrad are actually discussing to make everyone and their dog want to block them. Judging by the first two pages of recent threads on both, they seem like generally nice people who I disagree with politically very much, but could still imagine spending a fun evening with without anyone getting murdered. And at most game nights I’ve attended, politics is one of the banned discussion topics anyway xD
Lemme be absolutely clear, I’m not arguing for suddenly reversing the defederation of those two instances. That’s not an argument I’m qualified to make, first of all because I don’t know the full history we have with them. What I’m trying to ask is whether we’re absolutely sure all these defederation decisions are solely based on provable facts and past behavior, rather than some instance admins simply disliking how certain people think and deciding they know better than their users what they should or shouldn’t see. Just like the Tesseract dev recently were exposed trying to do. Because if it’s the latter, then it’s a very dangerous road we are on.
My own experience is that in 3+ years on Lemmy, I don’t remember having a single bad interaction with someone from Hexbear, for example. That’s why I’m so surprised to find so many instances defederating them. I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s bad experiences, but I think everyone should ask themselves whether they actually had those experiences themselves or have only heard about them from others?
Also worth adding, I fully understand I’m using a free service (although I do make a small monthly donation to my instance) and no instance is obligated to provide a platform for any content they don’t want to. As you said, anyone can host an instance and freely choose who to federate with. But if we cannot trust the admins of these large, well-known, and promoted (e.g. join-lemmy.org) instances to make decisions based on the common good of their users rather than their own personal opinions, then the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers. And that’s something to be plenty sad about.
Btw, I’ve been thinking about hosting my own instance just for myself. But wouldn’t it be really hard to discover new communities that way? To my understanding, an instance only receives posts and comments from communities that someone on that instance is already subscribed to?
99.99% of the time a murderer is not in the process of actively murdering anyone at all… atm. If you look just prior to any major western election, you may notice a difference in the content. Another point there is that the tankie triad is actually HEAVILY moderated - any comment remotely reminiscent of possibly being negative (or perhaps not supportive enough?) about Russia, China, or North Korea gets removed. I might be slightly hyperbolic on this point - I do not care to find the precise dividing lines between what is allowed there or not - but the fact remains that they are HEAVILY curated echo chambers. So… of course people are going to get along inside of them.
Anyway it is not for any of us to say why people want to defederate from a troll or echo chamber instance - if people desire that, then they should have that right, personally for themselves, right? Even though it makes the network effect harder to describe for the rest of us. Again, this would be a totally different conversation if there was a true instance blocking feature existing in Lemmy, but as it is, there is only defederation vs. no defederation, at which point very many instances choose one of the options made available to them.
And no means no? Or at least, it should. And we should respect that too? It is naive to try to force a victim to put up with bullying tactics, especially when it is always an option for the victim to leave the Threadiverse altogether, rather than stay and be subjected to seeing all of that.
You have not had sufficient time yet to fully inform yourself on the subject, but you will get there, at which point you won’t need to simply believe what I say but you will know for yourself. One great place to start btw is the MeanwhileOnGrad community, which documents a bunch of the reasons for division.
I need to add this though: you said yourself that you ignored political topics, yes? So… if you are looking for your keys, and you remember dropping them somewhere, but you restrict yourself to looking everywhere except there, and then don’t find your keys… do you see where I am going with this? Perhaps that was not even your conscious choice: maybe your admins made that decision for you by blocking certain specific user accounts, which would profoundly affect your “view” as to what Hexbear is. Having personally witnessed mods calling for users to kill themselves, then doubling and even tripling down on that, I for one have no trouble believing any of the thousands of other stories about Hexbear’s toxicity. Here is one post that provides a compilation of links: https://discuss.online/post/13916278. Oftentimes the originals get removed so it may be hard now to verify those historical events, with so much time having passed between then vs. now.
And yes, I’ve personally experienced those interactions my very own self. I walked right into a community like ChapoTrapHouse (though perhaps it was one of their ancillary ones?), accessed via browsing All - CRUCIAL NOTE here: therefore I lacked the context of having read the sidebar text first (btw some 3rd party apps seem to go out of their way to hide that even, requiring like 5+ clicks plus moderate scrolling, i.e. buried quite deep) - and I made the mistake of saying something to the effect that Biden was at least working towards lowering the price of gasoline in the USA. I would have been up for a well-grounded discussion, replete with factual information and having cited source material, but instead people relentlessly continued to send me Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after I stopped responding, and not messages like “I believe you may be incorrect and here is my reasoning”, but mere emotional vomit, venting their frustrations with the world onto me who dared speak again the trends that prevailed inside of their echo chamber, where beyond a certain level of dissent is no longer allowed. It may help to know that that is the entire point of ChapoTrapHouse, but how would I have known that, browsing by All and not even making a post, just replying to a comment inside of it?
And then either just before or just after that, I made the same mistake again, this time for lemmygrad.ml. Afaik, I am banned from neither space (unless it was done retroactively), but I almost left Lemmy altogether when I realized that it truly was not fun to be here. I continually received notifications for again WEEKS and WEEKS as people continued to dogpile onto that comment. There is no way in Lemmy to disable notifications on a comment btw (this this capability exists in PieFed). Presumably I could have deleted it but I’ve never backed out of my opinion before and that thought literally never occurred to me - I want to be told that I am wrong, when I legitimately am. However, these people were offering idiotic takes, and it therefore became my problem for continuing to entertain those communications.
Another point to note is that nobody is saying that ALL users on the triad, including Hexbear, are bad. Though conversely, if a majority of problematic content is coming from that source, and the mods+admins refuse to do anything about it from their side, then defederation becomes a tool of last resort to try to protect your own users from such harassment - which again, obviously is not coming from literally 100% of the users on those instances. Rather, defederation is reflective of a breakdown in communication between instance admins, with irreconcilable differences that cannot be… reconciled, any other way.
the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers.
Yes, but (1) this has already happened long ago, much of it predating the existence of the Threadiverse even, like Hexbear is very old and only later switched to using Lemmy, also Lemmy was an echo chamber even before federation with other instances (lemmygrad.ml) was implemented; (2) this theoretical FOMO about “discoverability” should not in practice trump my own personal rights to not have to listen to anything that I do not wish to see - e.g. I do not find it enjoyable to see mods tell users to kill themselves, literally, with a gun; and (3) please DO actually read about The Paradox of Intolerance. Defederation is bad, yes, amputation of a human limb is also bad yes, but sometimes it is preferable to an even worse alternative.
I think we do not differ on ideological grounds though - you concede that IF members of an instance are caught relentlessly trolling and otherwise harassing those of other instances, then in theory defederation is an acceptable outcome? Not an ideal one but… if the software allows for zero other alternatives, as has been the case now for many, MANY years? In that case all that remains is to read some of the examples of this actually happening, which you had not encountered before. The links I included above should be a good place to start at least, but there are just tons and tons and tons more where that came from.
Hypothetically, imagine someone saying “death to America”… okay, perhaps they should have the right to think it, perhaps even say it, but why should I have to be forced to hear it, constantly, and not be allowed to do anything at all to stop it? Defederations are decisions that instance admins have made regarding what content they will allow to be platformed on their machines or not. They NEED to have the right to make this decision for themselves.
This in turn places the burden of deciding which instance to join or not onto the end-users. You will want to pick one that matches your values. Here too it gets difficult, especially when instances are not forthcoming about what or particularly why they do what they do. Very little to almost no progress has been made on this front IMHO, at least on the Lemmy side, except to offer the generic advice to join Lemmy.zip or perhaps better yet PieFed.zip and use its significantly enhanced (yet still very imperfect and in fact quite problematic in other, just different ways) instance blocking tools of PieFed.
I was going to agree to disagree, but I couldn’t resist biting one more time because the link you posted turned out to be really interesting, but probably not for the reasons you were expecting… It’s past midnight where I live and I have work tomorrow so I’ll keep this one short.
Two things. First, just a reminder that like I wrote in my last message, I’m not arguing for any instance to re-federate Hexbear or Lemmygrad. It’s clear even just from reading this thread that most users don’t want to see them, and that’s actually a perfectly valid reason to maintain the status quo. But at this point it’s also pretty clear that ideological reasons and personal opinions are part of why those instances are so widely defederated and we are lying to ourselves if we insist otherwise.
Second, let me prove it by using your alt’s post you linked. I’ll be really frank here as you seem like someone who won’t take it personally. It’s obvious you feel very strongly about this matter, you’re good with words, and you’re not scared to influence others to adapt your ideals. Your post on discuss.online is honestly very well written if that was your goal. It’s manipulative, but not in instantly obvious way. It’s a textbook case actually: (All quotes below are directly from the post)
- Starts with an appeal to fear (“…we don’t even know how many users this is turning away from us…”)
- Overgeneralization from anecdote (“…Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here…”)
- Poisoning the well (“…at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith…”)
- Appeal to social proof (“…Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated…”)
- Loaded language (“…troll instance…”, “…flooding over here…”)
- False consensus (“…most of us…”)
- Shifting the burden of proof (“…the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?..”)
- Flattery (“…Discuss.Online’s much better admin practices…”, “…you are doing a fantastic job of being admins…”)
- Strategic concessions (“…That one I understand may be more problematic…”)
I could go on, but it’s late and I’m tired…
Then add what looks like a mountain of evidence, but is mostly a handful of trolls and douchebags, something you can find from almost any larger instance. Most people aren’t going to dig through the “evidence”, and just like that, discuss.online defederated Hexbear. It’s not my place to comment on the decision itself, especially since it doesn’t affect me. I’m just pointing what happened there.
much of those funds go into the moderation and instance maintenance costs of the “highly controversial” Lemmy.ml,
That’s not true at all, the maintenance costs of lemmy.ml’s are miniscule compared to what the devs get.
However, that delves into a whole other can of worms on how PieFed instance blocks have problems - namely that people on the receiving end can still reply to them, though only people on the same originating instance will see those replies (or perhaps it’s worse and everyone using Lemmy will see them while everyone using PieFed will not? or perhaps something else altogether?).
As I understand it, keeping in mind it’s been a bit since I looked at it, it depends on where the community the interaction is taking place in is hosted. That’s always the central truth and where other instance collect the votes, comments etc. from. So say piefed user Alice blocks a user Bob who is on a different instance, or the instance Bob is on altogether.
If Bob then replies to Alice in a community hosted on lemmy then the reply is accepted and federated out to everyone. Alice’s instances notes that she blocked Bob and drops the replies, no one on Alice’s instance can see them.
If Bob replies to Alice in a community hosted on Alice’s instance then Bob’s instance logs the reply, sends it to Alice’s instance where it gets discovered that Alice blocked Bob and the reply is silently dropped. Any instance now checking the community for new comments will not receive Bob’s reply since Alice’s instance dropped it. Bob’s instance however already logged the reply, so it remains local to Bob’s instance only.
What I don’t know is what happens among piefed instances, I think there is some functionality to notify Bob’s instance that Alice blocked him if Bob’s instance is running Piefed and it will delete the comment, but that part I’m least sure about.
The way blocks work in Lemmy is that a user will simply not be shown what they block, federation is completely unaffected. An ordinary user can only decide what they are shown not what others are shown.
This is a slanderous mischaracterization boardering on falsehood.
The poop is not actively falling out of the pigs anus, it has clearly fallen fully out but landed on the animal’s balls due to their massive size.
I hope you and I can share a respect of fairness and honesty, and your post will be clarified.
Thank you.
