this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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So you would prefer massive dictators with a profit motive instead? Because that's the alternative you are advocating for.
The entire point of federation as a tool of decentralisation is to address the issue of Spez, Musk, Zuckerberg and so on. Massive corporate dictators of the internet.
The solution is to split up the massive dictators into lots and lots of smaller ones, who can federate with who they want to in order to make a bigger space, and ultimately provide you with the choice of which approach you like better. It ultimatley allows all of these spaces to shut out corporate advertising as well because if McDonalds ever makes a fucking instance everyone will defederate that shit to get away from the advertising immediately.
If you like the mega dictators better. Reddit is over there. I assume you do not, because that's why you left it.
Don't show your ass like this. Don't do the "oh you like waffles so you hate pancakes?????" meme. I didn't say or suggest a single thing you just said.
What I actually DID say is that allowing ~~mods~~ admins to defederate entire communities is stupid. If you want to talk about THAT, fine.
EDIT: admins, not mods, my mistake, thanks god
I think you're really misunderstanding a lot about the fediverse if you think everyone must federate with everyone. Choosing who you federate with is a fundamental part of the design. It means communities can choose their own ways to operate, and we don't have to apply universal rules to everyone.
If a bunch of nazis want to run a server and post racist shit all day we can't stop them. But we can (and should) defederate from them. They can have their own private island. If someone wants to run a "safe" server for (e.g) LGBTQI+ and defederate from some of the big instances, they should be able to do it.
If you want to be in a community that allows almost everything except racism, and other horrible shit, and federates with almost all servers then there are plenty of servers that support that. You are free to choose that. That freedom to choose is a massive feature (not flaw) of the fediverse.
You can argue it should be user-level, and again that's something you can choose. But there will be servers almost everyone wants to defederate from, and don't want to leave it up to user-level blocking because new users will see horrible shit as soon as they log on for the first time.
Look, you're absolutely right about pretty much everything you said here. My issue is not exactly with the concept of federation per se, but with the potentially cavalier selection from a top-down level.
The Beehaw situation is really what I mean. At least for the next few months, it seems to me that there will likely be a lot of confusion and frustration over how this all works from new users, and even longtime users will be left wondering whether they need to just keep making new accounts in order to interact with the communities they have history in. C/technology on Beehaw is the de-facto tech community, and it's now inaccessible to a huge number of users, and for somewhat specious reasons.
I understand the utility of federation and de-federation, but I don't think it's being handled well right now.
I agree that BeeHaw defederating seems stupid, and is negatively affecting the growth of Lemmy.
But I think it will sort itself over time in one way or another. Either they will refederate, or they'll lose popularity and new communities on other servers will overtake theirs.
And what if they post racist shit all day on their own instance but also post normal and helpful stuff on communities of other instances? Just don't visit their communities, that's it. No need to block potentially helpful posts of members of that instance everywhere.
The same thing when there's a NSFW and your own instance doesn't want to see NSFW stuff. That's fine but it's not like the users of that NSFW instance are running around posting porn on every other community.
If some of them do, block the users. But there's no reason defederating the whole instance because those users can and do also participate just fine in other topics that have nothing to do with NSFW or nazi stuff.
For example why should a programmer that has a nazi instance as his home not be allowed to post memes in a community about programming humour from a regular instance, when he doesn't post anything there that is in any way related to him being a nazi?
"What if the Nazis are actually good people who are misunderstood" is certainly a take
Not what I said, but okay...
So you think that being a nazi automatically means that every view you have on anything is bad by default or that you are not able to participate in any normal conversations that don't touch that topic, like technology or gaming, without writing racist stuff?
Because that would be the only reason defederation would be justified in my eyes.
In any other case, just don't visit their home instance.
Yes I do. You're welcome to find or create instances that do tolerate Nazis. But I think most people want them defederated immediately. Saying that people shouldn't be allowed to have that option is ridiculous, and technically impossible.
Admins* defederate instances*. Mods only have power inside their /c/ community.
Of course you did. You said that the defederating thing turns you off the concept of Lemmy, and you advocated for it to be not-a-feature.
You are advocating for centralised mega platforms owned by mega dictators.
The are two options. Centralisation, or decentralisation. That's it. There is no magic alternative. This is the material reality that exists.
If it turns you off Lemmy, then what you are advocating for is centralisation. The literal polar opposite of what the entire fediverse aims to be and exists to solve. There is not an alternative and there will not be. You either get one owner of a super site or thousands of owners of minisites that federate in order to be emulate a supersite without the oversight. That's it. There is no third-way.
Criticizing and mentioning flaws of a system doesn't automatically make a person against the system.
Accepting the current flaws and then working on their solutions is the way to make Lemmy better for everyone.
The system IS federation.
It's not criticising flaws in a system, it's literally asking to dismantle it entirely. You can't have the fediverse or decentralisation without federation. That's the issue.
You either have centralisation. Or you have decentralised federation as a means of providing the size that centralised social media can reach without the centralisation part.
The crying about it being a flaw is just people whining about wanting what they're used to with absolutely no differences. They need to be told to simply get used to it with none of this babying. Their crappy suggestions and complaints are antithetical to the entire goal of fediverse.
All of them will go back to reddit and then find themselves back here in a few years when it's the content slop machine that they want it to be. They don't actually care about the goal, they just want slop and are unhappy that their are complications about getting their slop.