idk it’s my first time (kind of) trying to do dataviz, I thought the original post was super interesting but like other comments said, it was hard to read.
I think in a way it’s mostly because defederation is complex to show as links, since it is the break of said link, but hopefully this type of graph is better ?
you do lose the “group” of instances view, though (and also I did not bother with per instance MAU as raw number + percentage, or sofware used)
let me know what you think!
I like this representation a lot.
Blahaj federated lemmynsfw? Interesting
I think it’s prettier but harder to glean information from.
What a mess. Not the graph, just all the netsplits in general.
I love how almost everybody defederates with Lemmygrade lmao
Too be fair unlike the other instances this is without doubt an instance for the Russia bootlickers.
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I assume for you it may be because of your display type. But that made me think of colorblind people and how much this format probably totally excludes them as an entire swath of the population
But that made me think of colorblind people and how much this format probably totally excludes them as an entire swath of the population
I’m colorblind. It does :/
Do you have any design suggestions for op? (Assuming they’re the originators of this chart)
Because as it is, this data is pretty hard to concisely portray. Whoever made this decided to use color, alone, which, even for me who is not colorblind, thinks could use some improvement. Design IS hard, the question is how.
Chiming in as the OP, I used rawgraphs.io which only has 2 colour palettes for this amount of data (the first one only covers 7 colors the rest becomes grey), there’s the option to pick your own colours and I considered picking colours from instances logos so they would fit. No idea if that would have been better for accessibility. In general there are colourblind-friendly colour palettes suggestions out there and I should have checked them first!
In this particular instance, I don’t have many suggestions other than, maybe change the saturation?
To give an example, the rainbow pride flag has always looked muddy to me;

But I recently saw a colorblind friendly version that, to my eyes anyway, looks really good. I can much more easily distinguish the stripes in this one:

I don’t know the exact mechanics of how these are different. But maybe there’s a lesson here about colorblind friendly stats representation?
You’ve managed to nerd snipe me with the colourblind friendly Pride flag, the second one somehow looks really good!
The second flag’s colors look extremely well balanced in both brightness and color variance between them. That’s weirdly satisfying to look at.
But yeah, just having higher contrast in the chart would be a good start. Maybe some kind of three dimensionality with graded shadows? Or like have them as lines, and have them not have such similar angles? But then I expect that to be messy and not quick to read, either.
The porn one.
fedinsfw.app looks like.
I have to say, now it’s even more amusing to hear people claim ‘.world is a bunch of narrow minded [whatevers] who block all opinions they don’t like’ (2 instances 😱)
2 of the major instances in this graph. They might block many more that are smaller but I didn’t check.
Specifically the 2 instances that everybody blocks, and it’s mostly fans of those two instances that complain about it.
I notice that it presents sites with the same editorial body as separate cases, such as piefed.ca and lemmy.ca. Perhaps it would make sense and potentially improve readability to collapse any cases that have the same in and out arcs as each other. (So, all the cases that have no blocks and only block lemmygrad as one collapsed entry, for example.)
I’m on sh.ijust.works because it has a bad word in it. I don’t know what you’re all complaining about
It’s very pretty and a worthwhile attempt, but personally I think it’s rather unreadable lol. All you need is four circles for the four major groups that defederate.
Hexbear uses a whitelist so they are not federated with a bunch of these instances besides .world
The Hexbear Great Firewall exists to keep the Beanis contained
So why does everyone hate lemmygrad and hexbear? I’m out of the loop on that.
they are too extreme for the normal extremists.
Tankies act a heck of a lot like Alt-Right MAGA, both outright calling for genocide so long as it is done against their enemies rather than allies. In short, tankies claim to be leftist, but aren’t.

That said, Hexbear isn’t even that much really, so much as pure trolling for its own sake. Both are examples of what happens when echo chambers are allowed to exist for a long time - the people inside become radicalized and immune to factual information from the outside that may run counter to their allowed list of interpretations of matters.
tankies.
Hexbear originated from ChapoTrapHouse fandom which is a part of the so-called dirtbag left that explicitly antagonizes (neo)liberals. They also don’t use downvotes and encourage users to voice their opinions instead.
So every wave of redditor freaks the hell out when they get a handful of hexbear users clowning on some take like it’s a coordinated brigade attack.
I have mixed feelings about that. Thanks for explaining!
lemmygrad because they are perceived as tankies / commies, and thus get all the kneerjerk reaction from the people who are unwilling to apply the same standards to the US, the EU or Israel.
Hexbear, honestly no idea.
tankie bullshit
In addition to comments others have made about some of the colors being difficult to see/differentiate, I think it would be worthwhile to distinguish one-way defederation from mutual defederation, perhaps with a texture?
It would make the graphic busier, but I also would enjoy seeing population percentages next to each instance name (to give weight to the significance of certain defederations, e.g. how much of the fediverse are you excluding by defederating with hexbear vs lemmy.world).
I find it mildly interesting that there’s no inverse of lemmygrad, that defederates from everybody else
Defederation is often seen as a last resort and generally seen pretty negatively. Defederating everyone would also get rid of most content
Yeah but this graph would have so much more data >:)
beehaw?
Some instances use allowlist meaning other servers are defederated unless added to the list. Hexbear is the only major instance that uses this model, to my knowledge.
It doesn’t even Include https://lemmy.today/ that has no defederation or blocking at all, and has never had, since the admin feels it’s up to the user and not the admin to decide these things. You know, free and open internet, remember?
Also one of the best themes of all Lemmy instances if you ask me.
You gotta ask the OOP about that, but my guess is, in a graph that shows instances that defederate, why include an instance that doesn’t?
I see your point I guess. Perhaps defederation is something that users want, and then they are happy to see who does it the most?
Im not like that myself, but I can see the point.
why include an instance that doesn’t?
Because it lets you see how common or uncommon defederations are relative to the total set of all instances (or at least, all minus the long tail of very-low-user-count ones). And although it would make the graph larger, it would also make it sparse and IMO that would also be easier to read.
It could also give a misleading impression that all instances defederate or are defederated by somebody, making people think it’s more common than it actually is. (Or maybe not doing that, if you include allish instances and it still ends up being not very sparse.)
Came here to say that!
I can’t comprehend why people would join instances in the list. If you don’t like a particular instance, just hop into the user settings and block it! Why let others set your blocklist?
The first and most obvious is that (last I checked on Lemmy) per-user instance blocks only block posts, not comments. This means that for truly spammy instances (cough Hexbear cough) it requires an instance-wide block to achieve.
Secondly, I would argue it is the same as any other reason to choose an instance. That being, I have to generally like the vibe and agree with the way it’s run. For example, I have to agree with the instance rules and trust the admins to moderate them. This is an extension of that.
In the case of lemmy.ca specifically, I would say every major defederation I know of has been cast to a community vote and has had solid reasoning behind it. It comes back to trust and matching opinions: I (currently) trust the admin team to have reasonable defederations as they have matched or been similar to my opinions in the past.
I enjoy not having to self-moderate my experience outside of individual users or rare cases. Choosing an instance that generally aligns with your views allows your admin team to do some moderation for you.
Might be frontend-dependent, but it’s certainly an issue if comments are not filtered the same way.
Otherwise, alright, I see your point!
because it’s less work.
Besides ideology, preferences, bot filtering, or content, there’s also the matter of blocking things like CSAM, gore, etc. Lemmy proposes to not only factor in user preferences but also to properly curate the content via its moderators.



















