this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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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.