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this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Ask Lemmy
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Let me rephrase then. What is there to protect the Fediverse from control?
The Fediverse is decentralized, which means that it cannot (or at least it would be very, very difficult) be shut down by anyone. On an individual level, any user is free to start their own instance or community with their own rules in place should another instance or community become undesirable. If there is something you don't like or that is somehow stifling to you, start your own and make it the way you want it.
That anyone can run a node. I could put one in my basement.
Why do you think people want it to have no control?
4chan exists, people would go there if they want a lawless wasteland. Or that weird 4chan ripoff that gets spammed every couple months here. Plebbit? They change the name constantly
And there's fringe instances where they claim to want that lawlessness, but look at their modlogs and they stamp out anyone who disagrees with them. So you can try an "anarchist" instance if hypocrisy is ok with you..
But your question is coming from a very unpopular perspective.
The vast amount of people want someone in control because otherwise it's just a bunch of trolls who don't have a choice if they use the big platforms, because they're IP banned from there.
Fediverse will always have a way for the dregs to get in, so having someone with "control" is necessary. Otherwise normal people leave....
I think some time in the future we're all going to wake up to the realization that the mods were the problem and a big part of why the right wing are growing while the left are dying out.
In the past couple decades the left has fumbled so hard they have completely destroyed themselves and their ideals with almost no sign of recovery for the next few decades.
No...
Because you can make an instance right now and be the admin with full control, and have it be the lawless wasteland you claim everyone wants.
You would fail just like all the others before you, because even if someone thinks they want that, they quickly realize they dont when they go somewhere like that.
This is bog standard low empathy thinking from the right.
You assume you're a "silent majority" and everyone thinks like you, because you lack the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes
For fucks sake, voat is what you say people want, look into how even reddit maga enjoyed that once they finally found a place "free of moderation".
Spoiler:
When they realized they couldn't ban dissent and it wasn't a safe place, they left.
Which is my point a little bit. But you assume it fails because people don't want it. Leftist need to change to want it if they want to survive.
For fucks sake you're all suppose to be leftist and you can't even re-create a co-operative based approach to your digital space. But you're all going to say "we need to universalize X, Y or Z" but when it comes to your cat post we need a hierarchical system where ultimate control is given to a select few faceless individuals??
There is no future for the left if you rely on moderation. Moderation will inevitably become the tool of tech billionaires to control our digital spaces. Being able to stand up new instances is not a defense to protect these spaces against that. The left needs spaces to disseminate information. Spread ideas and build momentum. The only logical conclusion becomes that the minute it is popular enough to be useful then it will also be popular enough to for the right to target. If lemmy does not develop ways to guard against control by a select few faceless individuals then it will go the way of reddit if not worse. Without spaces to grow, then the right will continue their trend of capture people of all ages to their ideas and principals.
And those exist...
You want a space
One centralized location where everyone is, and no one is allowed to do any moderation.
That will never happen, because no one wants to hang out with a bunch of Nazis and bigots, and that is going to be the one group who will abso fucking lutely show up in droves to a social media website with zero moderation and a leftist lean.
If you legitimately still don't understand any of this, you're gonna have to ask someone else for more help.
What spaces are those?
That's it, basically. Even if someone bought up all instances and domainnames (which would require that server admins sell them, which i can't see many doing, or else they wouldn't run a fediverse service in the first place), there's nothing stopping you from creating a new instance outside of the control of this person the same day. It literally cannot be simply taken over by, say, Microsoft.
Right, and I'm thinking this is not actually a solid way to protect fediverse from what is happening everywhere else.
We can all create instances, but there needs to be engagement for it to matter. I'm not looking at this from the point of view of "what can I do to enjoy my time on the internet while my rights are taken away and I'm told my sister should go to jail for wanting an abortion"
There is a pattern that occurs with seizing digital spaces. It starts small. They begin dog whistling in small communities. Not enough to get banned. Just enough to get reactions. Based off the reaction they target a few of the weaker ones. Whistles get louder. They link those to their influencers who post to their base. That base begin to show up and the community begins to fracture. Mods get overwhelmed. Ask for help to increase mod team. Some of the new mod team are the very people poisoning the community or are affiliated. The new moderators make it worse. Users begin to block or leave the communities. More dog whistles. More growth from the right until the community is captured. They move on to target another bigger community and are now using the first community as a pool to feed into the bigger one and turn it. So you can de-federate but nothing really stops the attacks. There is no real mechanism right now to guard against what has happened as far as I see it.
If lemmy were to grow as big as other sites, it will be just as likely to swing hard right unless something else is done.
The "swing to the hard right" comes as soon as more normies arrive. There are basically two ways this goes:
a) badly behaved normies get the boot. comes with the side effect of keeping the cost for instance admins low and the work for mod teams small, but also means that we stay a niche. I have no issues with this.
b) normies come here and do as they always do. this is your scenario. Since normies - since they are normies - will simply swarm to single instances, as we saw at the API exodus, the rest of the fediverse will sooner or later defederate from those single instances if they aren't able to keep their normie horde in check. This is fine, actually. If i really want to look at something only the normies are talking about, i can simply fire up my normie-instance account and see all i want.
Since we have a simple mechanism of keeping badly behaved instances in check, i cannot see how your scenario actually comes to fruit.
Both a) and b) only works for so long. We're not talking just about users. We're talking about coordinated efforts by group's backed by financial support to slowly take over. I've seen them go so far as getting themselves onto mod teams. They have it down to a science mean if we're not making them rewrite their books constantly then lemmy is just going to go the way of all other platforms.
I do not agree to your premise that we can't do anything against your scenario. It's simply a matter of moderation or the lack thereof. Compromised Instances will sooner than later get defederated.
Best Example: lemmygrad.ml or lemmy.ml - those are the instances of the lemmy coders, which are hard auth-left, and even they got defederated by most of the fediverse, and piefed was created (besides other reasons) to get a codebase that isn't dependent on russia-apologists.
If you're wanting a planned in advance ideal solution, that's not really possible, but people can collectively respond to problems as they happen and adapt, as long as they aren't constrained from doing so.
I believe the pattern and tactics you describe are always going to be more effective on a platform controlled by a company like Reddit, because any efforts to counter them are ultimately limited by the agenda of the platform owners. There are people on Reddit trying to investigate and call out deceptive commercial spam, but when the spammers block them to prevent a response, set their post history to be unreadable, buy moderator positions, and admins only care about their own power and profitability (cutting users off from api etc), the deck is stacked against them. In the end it's just not their website.
Ultimately this is an organizational challenge, not only a technical or platform design challenge. If the organization is a collection of users who generally want genuine non-manipulative interaction between real people, and the protocol is set up to make it easy for them to route around malicious attempts to usurp control, that doesn't mean immediate victory over adversaries but it is a big leg up.
All scaled Internet sites, no matter the country, shows that there needs to be control of some sort. The problem is that there isn't a way to create a distributed way of control/ownership.
But there is. Between the two options, moderation or community controls, I'll pick community controls.
But this is kind of my point. Lemmy should not be recreating what we already know end up as a tool that is used by authoritarians to control us. Lemmy should be generating more new ideas and testing them out. New instances with new features. Some will work some won't. It's why I get a little pissed off seeing people who claim to be leftist, claim they'll punch a nazi, claim that Trump and Bezos and capitalism is responsible for great suffering who them go on to just use lemmy for posting feel good fun time cat pictures and moth memes. We should be doing more. Because at some point we'll need tools and by the time we need them we're not going to have time to fiddle fuck trying to get them to work. We needed tools 15 years ago.
The devs have flat out stated they aren't going to develop those tools. I don't know if they would integrate those tools if developed by others.
The decentralization is there, but in theory the owner of the largest node could defederate from everyone else, forcing users to leave the largest instance or put up with it?
It would be a lot like Meta in that way - the only reason it has survived is because everyone was already there and there's no way in hell to get everyone to switch to the same new thing. I genuinely don't know which direction users would go, lemmy users are an odd bunch.
lemmy users who are ideological tend to just align with the ideology of their instance, and are happy to defederate from instances that don't align with their political beliefs.
and i don't really blame them. a lot of instances are tiny, but very active, and extremely toxic in their userbase. the majority of hate speech and hostility I get on the fediverse comes overwhelmingly from a small group of instances, which I eventually just blocked.
and it makes sense if an admin has their instance's communities brigaded by one of these other instances, they should probably just block it entirely for the health of their instance's users.
nothing. it's at the mercy of the instance admins or those who host the instances.
if at some point they get bought up, or decide to collude, you won't have any options.
they are also subject to the national laws in which their servers reside.
people forget, reddit started as a server in someone's basement too in 2005. it was a start up, then it got purchased by conde nast in 2006, who started advertising it. i found reddit in 2007 as part of Wired's website feed.
reddit was niche until the mid 2010s, it became a top 10 website in 2017-2018, and now is 7th most popular site on the internet, just behind twitter/x.
Exactly. This was my thought. I remember early reddit. It was amazing and we all said the same shit Being able to upvote and downvote posts meant anything could be posted and the community moderated. Then it all shifted. Voting no longer mattered other than to be smug and say you don't agree. I look at lemmy and it seems like it took the moderator first approach. It took the worst parts of reddit.
If you don't understand the distinction between voting and federation, perhaps toy need to do some more reading?
Nothing I said implied this. We're all having a discussion here. I don't think this type of lazy statement helps anything.
User unfriendlyness.
Visually, Fediverse isn't like reddit, instagram, or any other popular social media places.
You need to put in some effort to even browse it.
it's a step in the right direction but still a small step and it took a lot of effort
I agree. I think fediverse is such an amazing step towards something great. But i don't want to drop this ball. I believe there's so many balls dropped over the past 20 years. I think we need to wake up