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Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (beehaw.org)

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

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Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.

I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.

For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.

This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.

Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hi, Beehaw user here. You can downvote me all you want and they'll never appear on my instance so that won't be an issue. I could be sitting at -50 on your instance and it'll always appear as 1 on mine.

Honestly though, I'm a big fan of the defederation decision (at least for now). It's only a temporary measure until Lemmy gets more powerful mod tools and then they'll refederate when they can more easily moderate the trolls and bad actors. This is one of the features of the fediverse, got an instance that's producing a large amount of trolls? Not anymore! Insta-community clean. The only people I've ran across that don't like it are normally the people that end up getting banned tbh.

Edit: For reference to the vote scores, on Beehaw this is currently sitting at 25 upvotes for me. If anybody is viewing from an instance with downvotes, that's how it appears for Beehaw users.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Personally, I think there is way too much overreaction to the defederations. I agree with admins’ reasons, and it is clear that the minute there are sufficient moderation tools available, that the impacted servers will be re-federated.

The pressure is now on the developers to start pushing more iterative moderation tools - something that wasn’t a priority before Reddit decided to implode, and now looks like it needs to be reprioritized. This is a project/project management issue.

The problem isn’t the decision to defederate, it’s that the only solution to handle bad actors is binary. It’s like shaving your head because you have over-dried out hair, when you’d rather just cut the split ends.

I am willing to be patient because I see Lemmy as a long-term engagement. I’ve been off Reddit since the AMA and haven’t had any desire to go back. I’d rather invest the time here and show the devs that prioritizing more iterative mod tools is a good ROI for them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

…before Reddit decided to implode…

I like this choice of words. The wounds suffered by reddit are aggressively self-inflicted.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Completely agree, I don't like that defederation is the only tool but glad that it's there at least. Looking forward to when those more powerful tools can be developed for the mods but this works as a bandaid for now.

The only interaction I've had with Reddit is going through my saved posts and bringing over to Lemmy what I think is worth it. Next up is deleting the account and editing all the comments.