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Is defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works still necessary? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.

Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.

Two months on, I'm wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I'm just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The main problem I personally have with defederation is that it can make it very difficult to discover and participate in already niche communities.

Sure, being open to everyone comes with its problems. But a large user base that's able to connect with each other is essential to these niche communities. Let's say I had an interest in Virtual Boy homebrew development. Say someone created a community for this on lemmy.world, I would obviously want to join this one instead of creating my own, because we'd likely already only be a handful of people. Now a lot of instances start defederating from lemmy.world for whatever reason(s) (and sure, there are likely good reasons to do so). This would likely completely kill such a niche community. Sure, you could try and coordinate moving the community to a different instance, but finding an instance that isn't defederated from any of each users' home instances will be hard if defederation becomes so commonplace. Users could also all create an account on that new instance, but most users probably don't want to create dozens of accounts because each of their communities happens to be on a different instance.

I already created accounts on multiple instances because the instance I was using either defededated from communities I wanted to interact with, or other instances with communities I wanted to interact with defederated with my home instance. I don't even care about my accounts as such (content history, upvote count or whatever), and transferring subscribed communities (and saved posts/comments) is done with a simple script within minutes or even seconds, but having to find a new instance every few weeks because instances start defederating from one another can be cumbersome (and again, it will eventually lead to shrunk niche communities).

If I see a user or community that I don't want to interact with, I simply block it and move on.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

"a lot of instances start defederating with Lemmy world"?

Besides beehaw, which ones are you talking about?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That was just part of my theoretical example of what would be my "horror" scenario. I don't know which instances defederate with lemmy.world off the top of my head.

EDIT: To clarify, I don't think the (de)federation situation is terrible in its current state. I'm saying that it can go downhill pretty fast if instances start defederating others because some non-critical amount of users of the other instance have political/world views that don't align with theirs. Of course a line has to be drawn somewhere and I 100% agree with defederation of instances that are for example dedicated to nazis or whatever, I just don't think defederation of general purpose (or broader purpose at least) instances is a good idea, even if these instances are also a home to some questionable people.

My original comment was in reply to the parent comment suggesting that defederation from lemm.ee (which happens to be my home instance, at least for this account which is the one I use the most) should be considered because it is home to fascists. It's not purpose-built for fascists, there may happen to be some fascists on this instance because it's open registration (and I think open registration is a good thing in most cases).