this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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You Should Know

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YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!

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Why YSK: Choosing an instance with defederation policies you're most comfortable with is important to make your Fediverse experience smooth in the long run.

Here is a chart showing the defederation count of each instance.

Instance Defederated with how many other instances
beehaw.org 405
feddit.de 101
lemmy.world 63
lemmy.ml 44
sh.itjust.works 4
exploding-heads.com 3

You can get it by going to the instance's instance list and scrolling/Ctrl+Fing down to "Blocked Instances". To find the instance list, go to https://your-instance.url/instances, for example, https://lemmy.world/instances

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[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 year ago (23 children)

This is kinda why I wish we had user-level instance blocking, there aren't any popular instances that match my preferred blocklist and I don't want to have to go out and request federation for everything I want to see. For example, the top sites I don't want to see are lemmy.ml, lemmygrad, and exploding-heads, and while beehaw gets all three, they also block instances I don't find problematic like lemmy.world.

So I ended up on lemmy.world and manually block all the stuff I don't want to see, but it'd be loads easier if I could just ask not to be shown content from instances I want to avoid.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Kbin allows user-level instance blocking, so that functionality should be feasible to implement in lemmy eventually.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Couldn't this be accomplished by deploying your own personal instance? Or am I missing something.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You're right, however it might not be that simple especially when considering costs.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Pretty cheap if your personal server is just for you... And even if you want to add a few friends & family. I plan on starting my own instance next month.

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

If you're on android, connect has the ability to filter whole instances.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like it's more important to know why these defederations happened than how many there are. Well beehaw just screams their reason with their number but that's a separate thing.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Way too complicated and tedious. Do you audit the blacklist of your adblocker? Doubtful.

For the vast majority of people, a cliff's notes and prior experience with an instance's general moderation policy and trustworthiness will have to suffice. Not so different that choosing a social media platform or subreddit, really.

In my experience, I think these numbers correlate nicely with how curated the moderation is and inversely proportional to the tolerance to objectionable content from a moderate POV.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When they defederated from lemmy.world, the stated reason was the open registration policy. Their registration process is handled manually. I suspect that they operate a much tighter ship when it comes to moderation. This has it perks and problems.

[–] [email protected] 74 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I tried to sign up to check it out, but apparently the essay I had to write pledging my undying commitment to a community I had not even experienced yet was insufficient to be accepted. Their loss.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Mine was the same. I am generally a nice person, I just want a nice place to comment to people, talk about gaming, cars/motorcycles, animals and technology but I wasn't good enough somehow. I literally wrote a paragraph. No idea what I had to say to get in.

I'm just a derpysmilingcat, I'm not evil lol

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

IDK, I don't feel like I had to say that much to get in with my alt. I just wrote about how I liked having some more heavily moderated spaces to discuss sensitive topics. I even mentioned that I planned to maintain an alt to access less moderated spaces, just that I also intended to respect the culture and the vibe of Beehaw when interacting there.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago

They are trying to create a "Safe and friendly place".

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They started with a commonly shared fediverse block list a lot of mastodon instances and stuff start up with. Since they've also defederated some instances that allow child porn, some political extreme instances, and some very large instances they couldn't moderate the influx from.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They also defederated from instances that have open sign-ups because they allow bots to join too easily. This included lemmy.world.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Pretty sure there are no significant instances that allow child porn.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would depend if you think lolicon or hentai of canonically underage characters in general is CP or not.
Doesn't matter in the case of Beehaw though because they defederate from any instance that allows pornographic NSFW content of any kind period - as do probably a majority of instances, at least until Lemmy creates better filtering systems.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Beehaw federates with porn instances like lemmynsfw.com

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Indeed. Hence, no one was all that bothered by the defederation from a large list of small instances with problem material. The question is "why is the number so high" and that's a large part of it

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

beehaw.org at 405

Jeeez, that pretty much cements my reason for moving over from them. Defederating lemmy.world and other big instances for moderation reasons was reasonable for the time being, but that sheer number overall shows the control they want over their instance, and so much is excluded as a result, a lot of it likely due to ideological misalignment.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (3 children)

When moving over from that other site it was the first instance I tried, for no particular reason.

They made me write a statement why I would want to join the instance (okay, you need to filter the bots, fair enough) so I wrote a nice little text to let them know. I guess I failed to write the keywords they were looking for, so they denied my application.

That told me all I needed to know about the mods.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I would have just closed the page the second they asked me to write an essay on why I deserve to be on their website, lol.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Eh, lemmynsfw.com has a similar sign up for. The difference is that they accepted the reason "this is my porn account"

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

Honestly you could say because you like to talk about tacos and it would get approved most of the time. We have that turned on because otherwise we'll get 60k spam users overnight. Email verification costs money especially if you're being spammed with 60k requests and the statement box stops all of it.

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[–] altima_neo 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Same here. I wrote a statement saying why I wanted to join. They had a community there that no one else had at the time, so I mentioned how I wanted to participate in the community there.

Got denied like 2 weeks later, but it was during that time they defederated from lemmy.world. At that point I knew I was wasting my time waiting to see if I'd get accepted or denied.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago

Last time I looked at the list, It's mostly an imported list of horrible mastodon/pleroma instances, not Lemmy servers, and seemed reasonable to me. Go take a look at a few.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think it's worth mentioning the amount of instances full of bots as well. I just started hosting my own instance and decided to check other instances' block lists to defederate from at least some bot instances. I now have about 50 blocked instances. (instances with 60k or so users each with no posts)

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago

Great post! I want to add to this, you can use this site to check what instance blocked who https://federation-checker.vercel.app/

Search with lowercase, for some reason did lemmy.world not show all the instances that blocked them only instances they blocked when L or W was in capital letters.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (4 children)

So is it possible for users in lemmy.world to see content from beehaw? Does this only limit beehaw users from seeing content on lemmy.world?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Lemmy.world users can see behaw posts, but beehaw users can't see Lemmy.world posts. Comments cannot be seen by anyone outside their home instance.

Beehaw defederated from Lemmy.world, but Lemmy.world did not defederate from beehaw.

If you look at a Lemmy.world community through beehaw, you will only see posts from before defederation, or posts made by unaware beehaw users.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure it goes both ways.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

You are wrong. Defederation only goes both ways if both instances decide to defederate each other.

Beehaw and Lemmy.world was one way only. You can see all of beehaw's posts, but none of your interactions will leave your home instance.

The comments under a post will only be from Lemmy.world users, however.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for clearing that up. I feel like I've heard both yes and no to this question. Still learning everything so it's hard to recall what was correct. Also just want to say how cool it is that people don't make you feel dumb for being wrong here. That's one thing I will not miss about Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can view beehaw through a browser. If you want to check for yourself. I did verify this by viewing the same community from beehaw and not just before commenting so I'm pretty certain I'm giving accurate information.

Welcome to Lemmy, I hope you enjoy your time here.

EDIT: upon further checking, what I have been saying seems to be inaccurate. It seems beehaw is no longer sharing posts, the newest beehaw post I can find in Lemmy.world is from 2 days ago. It is likely that 0.18.1 blocks post sharing to defederated instances.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Well that sucks, is it possible to transfer our account to another instance then?

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

My understanding is that we cannot. I've seen people talking about it maybe becoming a thing in the future, but right now the only option is to just go register your name on another instance. Alternatively, I guess you can host your own instance with just you (or a few friends I guess) and then you control what gets federated, but for me that seems like a little too much work right now. I may consider that in the future if I had more free time.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's a far stick up ones ass there at Beehaw.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

meh. to each their own.

That's the whole point of the fediverse, at least from my perspective. embrace the smaller communities as much as the big ones. same with open vs closed. they all serve their purpose and minimizes a homogeneous environment that allows niches to exist, much like the early internet.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They don't like federating with instances with open signups

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Maybe consider altering your links so that they point to the /instances pages of each site so that people can go directly to the list of federated and defederated instances for each. Likely there are people who haven't yet discovered that page.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is there a way to see what specific instances each instance has defederated from? Just curious

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
  • beehaw.org: 405
  • feddit.de: 101
  • lemmy.world: 63
  • lemmy.m:l 44
  • sh.itjust.works: 4
  • exploding-heads.com: 3
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmygrad has defederated from 43 other instances.

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