edgerunneralexis

Allowing instances to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist is actually a really bad idea. It makes the default not being federated with anything, which makes it far easier to create centralized isolated silos that it's hard to move off of while staying in contact with, and in general would just destroy the interconnected nature of the fediverse

Me neither lol. Posting kind of only makes sense when you're currently reading/rereading the series,and I'm not right now, so it's hard to come up with content.

The problem is that the entire point of instances is not just to spread the costs/load of hosting the network, but to allow people to find places where the culture and norms (and thus the moderation style and block lists) align with what they feel comfortable with, so they can rely on being able to find a place that will have a nice experience for them. For instance, I choose explicitly LGBTQ-friendly and anti authoritarian instances on the Fediverse. Automatically moving people around based on heuristics has the chance of really fucking that up for people. I don't want to wake up one morning and find myself on an instance that federates with whatever rightwing shithole instance will crop up in the next few months and have to avoid the platform or be harassed with dick pics and transphobia.

Additionally, having a centralized server for anything kind of defeats the point, no?

Allowing users to migrate as seamlessly as possible between instances is just an important part of making decentralization really effective too — it only really means something that it's possible to move to a different instance with a different culture and set of rules, norms, moderation style, etc, without losing access to the network as a whole if it's easy to do so, because only then does it become a real possibility for counterbalancing the power of any given instance.

I hope so! I'm definitely going to do my best to promote Lemmy on Reddit in those niche communities. I wish I had the time and personality to actually start the communities I want to see on Lemmy, but sadly I don't.

The thing is that there aren't significant direct production costs per user for technology services like there are for material items, just overall maintenance costs that only scale noticeably with a large increase of new users, so it would actually be possible to pay for infrastructure and salary costs and all of that with just a percentage of your overall userbase being subscribed and subsidizing the rest. This is actually a monetization strategy that's working out for some privacy focused services like ProtonMail. So it would be necessary to convince some users to sign up but not necessarily all of them.

Is there a way to view each instances block list? If not it should be implemented into the back end somewhere, once again to allow freedom of choice.

Also this is a really great idea, maybe you should make an issue requesting that feature on the Lemmy github!!

Yeah!! Mastodon has that and its very useful!

Users should not be left to "fend for themselves" against abuse/hate/racism having a platform.

This is precisely the point I've been trying to make elsewhere in the thread. Maybe some people want total individual freedom/responsibility to block or not, but most of us want to find an instance community that will protect us and serve our interests by dealing with that for us, so we don't have to go through that mental health damage constantly.

That's a really good idea! If there's anything I feel I'm good at, it's communication, and selling people on ideas!

I just want the freedom of choice for everyone. I'm tired of living in a world where there are people who think they know whats best for everyone else.

I hear you <3 I think we share the same goals, and might even agree on our ideal world (the best solution IMO would be to let users individually defederate from instances as a first line of defense and then have instances defederate from each other after the community approves of it only as a last line of defense). But I think practically speaking, there are places I disagree with you.

(Also, I apologize for the length of this comment, but I think we are in the early days of something extremely important with these federated and decentralized networks, and hashing out the culture and pros and cons and technical features of these things is really important to do carefully and intentionally to lay the groundwork.)

I think being able to defederate from hate groups and rogue instances is a very important feature of the network, because it allows communities to avoid other hostile communities instead of being forced into one giant, common, one-size-fits-all compromise social sphere where they are forced to coexist with communities who hate them or even want them dead.

A lack of this ability was one half of the problem with corporate social media, the other being that to solve this they had to use centralized moderation that, when banning a user, utterly banished them, instead if just separating two groups but allowing them to remain in a common network and have indirect connections, as in Lemmy.

Mods on one instance aren't able to moderate the comments and posts of people on other instances, so the only way for them to properly deal with users and communities that consistently refuse to moderate their own members is to defederate. If there's no way to defederate, there's no way for communities to essentially moderate their interactions with other communities, so if a group wants to do a mass harassment campaign against e.g. trans people or black people, all they need to do is start an instance where they'll never actually be banned or muted or have their comments removed, and they can then harass people on other instances with complete impunity, consequence-free, with the harassed people having no recourse but to individually choose to block the harassing instance.

Preventing that sort of mess where everyone has to fend for themselves with personal blocklists is the whole reason mods were invented in the first place, to be a first line of defense for everyone else, so we don't have to deal with hate and nonsense constantly. They're essentially a community defense organization. It would make lemmy basically unusable for marginalized people who face a ton of hate and harassment and this information and concerning directed at them to be left completely to their own devices on this front. Yes, they may be a somewhat centralized locus of power, but would you object to moderators doing their other functions such as banning or muting users, removing comments, etc too? Because this is very much in line with those things.

Anyway, independent of what the mechanisms are for deciding when to defederate, I think you have to look at the cost/benefit analysis, instead of just declaring it bad, and I have personally experienced the benefits. Many Mastodon instances regularly defederate from many other Mastodon instances, and yet that network has not turned into anything like what you fear, and I've directly felt the benefits of such defederation as certain never ending sources of problems and hate are effectively quarantined from the people that don't want to deal with them.

Moreover your assumption that allowing defederation will cause a degenerate network condition is verging on a slippery slope argument. Defederation will never be widespread enough to turn the Fediverse into just an array of mostly centralized hubs like corpo social media because it's a very extreme move you only do to cesspools of hate and fascism, so the network will just be a decentralized mesh network that isn't completely directly connected, which might be a small sacrifice in some abstract metric, but has direct benefits in making communities more liveable for people that aren't okay with being on something like 4chan.

Now to answer your main point. The decision to defederate one instance from another is the decision of the instance's owner(s), and so may be unilateral in that sense, yes, but thanks to the overall interconnectedness of the network, unless your current instance literally defederates from ALL other instances, if the mods on an instance do something you don't like, you'll always be able to find or make a new instance that is connected to all the people on the old instance and all the instances you disagreed about the blocking of. That's the most crucial aspect of the federated network — freedom of association and freedom from network effects. That freedom of association means there's competition between instances (and little barrier to entry for making new ones or switching), which will incentivize mods to implement collective decision-making such as polls. Additionally, most instances have a mission statement or description of the attitudes and goals of the instance and so it can be assumed that if people join that instance then they agree for the most part with that ethos and so as long as the mods act in line with that then it's fine.

By "ban" they mean defederate from. They're not banning an instance from the Fediverse, the instance that's defederating from the other one is just choosing not to interact with or have to see them anymore. So your rhetoric here is misapplied, because one instance defederating from another isn't silencing the latter for anyone else but the instance that made that choice. It's not analogous to restricting freedom of information or personal freedom at all, on fact it's precisely an exercise of personal freedom: freedom of association! It's more equivalent to just leaving a club and never coming back or hanging out around them anymore. Yes, it's done on the whole instance's behalf, so it effects more than just one person, but thats why random instance members can't defederate an instance they don't run from another instance, there's a decision procedure to make sure it represents the wishes of the instance as a whole.