this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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This isn't handwringing, though I can understand why it might come off that way. This is simply mulling over how things "actually work" in the fediverse as opposed to how people believe it works. I believe that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is and how it works. This is an educational issue that we have an opportunity to begin sorting out
In addition, my scenario of instance users subscribing to illegal content will still be valid even with moderation tools. The only way to stop that currently is defederation with instances hosting illegal content.
Federation/Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community. Gated communities shouldn’t be the expected norm. So, I would agree with the lemmy.world people who are upset at being broadly blocked from a Fediverse community. But it doesn’t matter because beehaw says it is temporary.
This is true, except for one element:
Fediverse should mean a user of any instance should be able to use any community the instance elects to federate with. Lemmy is open by design, but instances can just as easily switch that feature off and go to a allowlist method.
A commonly missed element with federation is that you federate with who you trust since you essentially mirror their content. It's less apparent with the lemmy migration, but mastodon used to caution its users to "join an instance that aligns with your preferences" for this reason.
Federation is really a philosophy about mutual trust, just like how email providers can block messages by user, instance, or domain.
Trust me, there's likely more gating present than you're aware of. Maybe not at lemmy.world (which as of this post is only blocking one site for reasons I won't mention), but this can get dark pretty quick if you leave things completely open.
A major instance (in terms of comunities) like Beehaw changing from denylist to Allowlist would be devastating for users on small and single-user instances, so I hope it never comes to that. Unless there's some process to get hundreds of tiny unknow instances in the Allowlist
I think some people see Lemmy as a way to host their own self-supported community on their own server, with users identifying strongly with the values of the instance, and with cohesion among the users of the instance.
While other people (me included) see instances more as something to just host the account, so we can participate in Commities across "the network", where "the network" is basically all the Lemmy instances except the de-federated extremists, or other walled gardens. User-cohesion is more on the Community-level and less on the Instance-level.
Do we want a small network of instances that have proven themselves trustworthy? Or do we want a large network of instances that have yet to prove themselves untrustworthy? Different people will have different answers
You do bring up a good point about needing to trust your federated instances because you're essentially mirroring their content
This is the kind of respectful, well informed, nuanced debate that I used to have on reddit and missed terribly until I joined the fediverse. I'm worried it's going to take some fairly firm moderation to keep it from nastifying in the future.
There's a bit of a culture clash going on in these defederation debates between the "yay it's the wild west, reddit admins can't tell us what to do, we can go anywhere and do anything" folks on the one hand and the "yay it's collaborative, reddit admins can't tell us what to do, we can build community and do our own thing and have our own rules" folks on the other.
I think that just as much as we as individuals can go where we like and interact with what we want, mods can set up whatever instances they want with whatever rules and federation boundaries they want.
Sooner or later two people's freedoms bump into each other and someone's desired freedom to say something hits someone else's desired freedom from hearing something.
I think that painting defederation as a destabilising nuclear option that will kill the fediverse is as extreme as saying the same of moderation. The mods at beehaw decided that defederation was the best solution in the short term to some problems including some highly nasty content that pretty much everyone condemns, without themselves becoming overwhelmed. I respect that. Beehaw is, as far as I can tell, a great place, and I'm sure it takes a lot of work to keep it that way. The beautiful and intricate garden you're walking through might not be able to exist without the wall separating it from the pigs next to it. I know you're not a pig, but also you know that the wall isn't a huge deal, given that there's a gate.
Thank you for phrasing my point so eloquently.
I don't think that assertion is based in reality. A server has to be hosted somewhere, and admins will generally choose to uphold those local regulations for the sake of their instance's own longevity. Federation has never meant that you communicate with literally every other instance. This isn't Tor where nodes pass along communications that don't directly involve themselves.
Two separate issues are prompting “defederation”. Blocking users from posting to your local community and blocking remote communities from being mirrored on your server. Those should be handled differently. Beehaw didn’t want trolls posting mean things and blocked every user on a server. Your concern about illegal content would be more a complaint about specific communities that feature that content.
Either way you shouldn’t blame an entire server for a few users or communities you don’t want. Expecting everyone on a instance to be like minded isn’t going to work.
The only way to not address things on a per-server basis is for moderation tools to be expanded in scope. Maybe that will be how things work one day, but it is not how things can work right now.
Completely understandable. I am not opposed to moderation or keeping people safe from harassment.
It's a stopgap measure until better moderating tools are developed. I can't blame them for it.
If that's the only way to stop harassment, yes, you do... anyone on that instance that isn't like-minded with the behavior that instance permits is well-advised to leave it for one better suited to their own beliefs.
By that line of reasoning all alt-right, homophobe, harassing, doxxing, trolling etc. instances should be allowed to access every other instance to spread their hate. Is that really what you want? I don't.
Why do you think entire instances will be devoted to that? You will have to block every instance that has open registration, since any open instance cannot guarantee one of the people you mentioned will not come in. I guess the issue I have is that I see moderation as something between users and communities. Not that the overall instance should be doing the moderation.
Because entire instances have already devolved to that and thus been blocked by the wider fediverse.
yeah this is like everything on our defederation list besides lemmygrad, shitjustworks, and lemmyworld--we're literally using a block list which is dedicated to those kinds of instances
Is there a central place to track these instances?. Or do you all have a text list or the reasons you defederated some that you may be open to sharing (even privately). I was looking for something specifically to avoid things like illegal content and the like.
https://beehaw.org/comment/300942
Nice thanks. Added those to my list at least. Beehaw has a ton, and frankly I dont even want to click through some on grounds of well...CSAM stuff ala burggit.moe etc
You might be interested to know that, as luck would have it, this was the first issue I picked up when scrolling through looking for a good introductory task to get used to the project: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3168
So this might change in the not-too-distant future (I haven't started doing any frontend work to support it yet though).
I think a blind trust of such list is kinda dangerous. But a common place where admins and user can tag and rate instances and hosted communities can be a good start.
Agree. Kinda what I was asking/looking for.
I’m a bit new to running an instance. There seem to be tools created for finding instances and communities. But not something that does the above.
So what happened with lemmyworld?
On some level I think you’re both right - this is roughly the problem that happened with email and spam.
At one point it was trivial to run your own Mailserver, this got harder and harder as issues with spam got worse. Places started black holing servers they didn’t know and trust, this drove ever more centralization and a need for server level monitoring/moderation because a few bad actors could get a whole server blocked.
We can know that bad actors will exist, both at the user and at the server level. We can also know that this has a history of driving centralization. All of this should be kept in mind as the community discusses and designs moderation tools.
Ideally, I hope we can settle on systems and norms that allow small leaf nodes to exist and interconnect while also keeping out bad actors.
Some are run or overrun by those kind of people. Have a look at how many instances are already defederated: https://beehaw.org/instances
We sure, I can understand Defederation from “skinheads.social”. I’m more concerned with large instances like lemmy.world who just are rather wide-open. I wonder if large open instances are just bad.
The Admins here have been pretty open about the fact that they're keen on re-federating with large instances once better moderation tools are available!
That's exactly it. Open signups and the volume that comes with that just highlights the lack of comprehensive moderation tools at the moment, certainly within instances, but also cross-instance - lots of very active conversations happening on this front though!
There totally are fascist instances though, and I think defederating from those is cool and good. I'm not thrilled about the beehaw defederation either, but I respect the mods' decision, especially since it's targeted only at the two instances with users who were actually causing problems and I can still access beehaw communities from my non lemmy.world accounts
My understanding is that people from Lenny.world can still “use” behaw by subscribing to communities and commenting on posts, but people on Behaw just can’t see them. Is that not how it works?
I have to say I chose behaw because I wanted a more heavily modded experience here. I really don’t mind them shadow banning whole communities if a disproportionate number of trolls are coming over from them. People have got the right to speak, not the right to be heard. The internet’s full of kids just wanting to be obnoxious, and I’ve got to say I’m more then happy that other humans are helping me to filter that junk out
Unfortunately, defederating means the cord has been cut. This means we still have what was previously been posted, but all future content is bidirectionally blocked.
When a Lemmy.World user posts to a Beehaw community right now, it updates the cached community that Lemmy.World stores. Beehaw has defederated with them, so the "source of truth" never updates. The source of truth is what updates other federated instances. As a result, someone on startrek.website, for example, will not see posts made by lemmy.world users to beehaw communities. The only people who can see what lemmy.world users post to beehaw right now are other lemmy.world users.
Won't that cause a major problem if/when Beehaw would want to refederate, and all that pent up stuff just pours on Beehaw all at once?
When/if refederation happens, the comments lost to the abyss will stay lost to the abyss. The source of truth will not update based on the past updates of a formerly defederated instance to my understanding
As far as I understand it (though it may be incorrect) - they won't be synchronized. Content between instances is synced/cached only when the instances are federated, and it doesn't go backwards - only posts after federation will be visible.
Just because this software can be used that way, doesn't mean you're required to use it that way.
If I want to start a lemmy server and not let lemmy.world in, there's nothing wrong with that.
Lemmy.world isn't owed anything, they're not owed to view content in my community, they're not owed that I show their content to my users. And if my users are unhappy with that, that's fine, it's their choice to stay in my enclosed community or not.
Just because we're running the same software and the same communication protocols doesn't change that.
Nah. I don’t think it’s an education issue. E.g. I do understand how it works, but see defederation as the nuclear option. As a user in a federated system I don’t care where the communities are hosted that I frequent. As long as it works. That’s the entire point of federation. Otherwise we could just remove federation all together and have everyone create a separate account per instance.
I get where the beehaw admins are coming from and it’s understandable. But it’s not good and chips away at what Lemmy is and could be.
This is one instance now where this happened and I’m not on either of these instances, so I’m unaffected. But if I see more of these defederations (no matter where), the Signal it sends me is that for my needs I likely still have to bet on Reddit and at max this will become an occasional visit.
We are still far away from this point. Just saying. And a normal user can’t be expected to understand it or relate to it. It’s bad UX if they have to. Arguing for them to be educated about it is nice in theory, but misses in reality of how things just are.
@Cipher I think of it more of an instructional issue specifically rather than learning issue. People explain "it's like email" but fail to deliver the fact that it should be more like "It's how the internet should work". Where people think Lemmy is THE SITE and can communicate with kbin THE SITE.
It should be mentioned that if anyone has built a website, that Lemmy is the software. You install Google Chrome on your computer, you install lemmy on your computer. You are now able to ACCESS all the other websites like you would in Chrome.
People think "oh it's like email, well I know Gmail is pretty good so I'll make an account there. Whatever decisions Google makes is by extension my decision." The average user doesn't know what email actually is. They don't know that you can make your own email service. They don't know you can even just buy a domain and have your own email address.
The only thing that bugs me about the fediverse as a whole is that these threadiverse concepts shouldn't have communities. If it was implemented as intended, you'd have to make a community by making a new instance. The community should be federated, and then duplicate communities would get individually federated or defederated.
I think the ambiguity of the fediverse is muddied by how each software is trying to implement it. And it's almost hard to incentivize making your own instance.
@trachemys
The problem with the idea that each community should be its own instance basically comes down to cost, both financial and time. If I want to make a community about something I'm passionate about I'd have to shell out money I don't have on hosting, buy a domain, learn how to actually host and administrate a Lemmy instance, and then spend like half of my time and energy maintaining it.
Not everyone is a programmer with programmer knowledge making programmer money.
This is why I think email analogy is very useful to get the basics of how Lemmy/kbin work on a technical level but falls flat on a practical and social level
You have what I would call federation idealists that feel that is should be just like email you should be able to contact anyone. This ignores the fact that email is private communication tool vs a public facing forum.
The argument that instances should be utilities with no "politics" or "culture" just ignores the reality.