To reduce centralization. The more spread out things are the less vulnerable Lemmy is to a major loss if an instance shuts down and the less power any single admin has.
!newcommunities@lemmy.world helps. You can also post about them in related communities if the community rules allow and communities can partner with each other to link in community sidebars.
I still don’t understand the point of DEfederating communities, if the individual users have the ability to block communities from their own personal experiences.
I see a community I don’t like? I can block it. But why should everybody have to not see it because it goes against MY views?
But then on the other side of things, I can’t move to another host instance, because all my comments won’t migrate with my profile. Right now I’m hosted on Lemmy.World. And if I transfer my account to another instance, it should say all previous comments would say “Lost_My_Mind@(new instance) Via Lemmy.world”. But it doesn’t. So now I’m stuck here.
You cannot defederate from a “community”, but you can have your specific user account block either a community or an entire instance (to varying degrees of effectiveness - you can still see posts from people on those instances, and chat with them, but you won’t receive “notifications” from them anymore).
Defederation from an “instance” is meant as a last-resort effort to avoid an enormous amount of moderation work, like if it keeps sending child porn across the Fediverse, or users are overwhelmingly harassing others or something.
Here, you can read about such occurrences directly from the sources involved (who chose to do it) like https://hexbear.net/post/1712067, and then various responses in return like https://programming.dev/post/2652745 (tldr: hexbear defederated from them, so they defederated in return to avoid people getting confused from one-sided conversations where messages could be sent but never received) and https://lemm.ee/comment/2155764 etc.
And yes, you are stuck at your current instance if you care about keeping your account. You can copy your rules like block list from one user account to another though, like I have an alt at StarTrek.online, which mitigates somewhat the pain of having to move. If someone were to try to send me a DM at my old one though, I would not get it at the new account - instead I would have to keep both active, forever. It turns out that the idea that you can move freely around the Fediverse was a lie - or at least, it is something that isn’t fully implemented yet. Theoretically it is something that could be done, if someone were to bother to implement that, but it hasn’t been done yet.
All of Lemmy is still beta software. It helps to lower expectations:-). It is still 1000x better than Reddit imho, b/c of (a) no ads and lack of other forms of enshittification as well (e.g. automatically playing videos that you cannot stop with a setting somewhere), (b) the people are more worth talking to here (generally speaking; except those places that tend to be defederated by the major instances, b/c of all the harassment they kept doing).
It turns out that the idea that you can move freely around the Fediverse was a lie - or at least, it is something that isn’t fully implemented yet.
I don’t think account mobility was ever an expectstion until recently, just that you could access all federated instances from any instance. I can ‘move freely’ with my account to any federated instance without needing separate logins.
iirc, it was one of the points sold to people as we migrated away from Reddit during the exodus. But I like your more precise phrasing of what it actually is.:-) More was told during the exodus though, e.g. “just as Reddit is falling, if the instance you pick likewise falls, then you can move your account to another one”, i.e. it barely matters which instance you picked at first, so just jump in and see. But different language may have been used at different times and places - e.g. the expectations of people already here vs. the newly incoming ones (like me:-).
I have limited agreement with your thoughts on defederation. The ability to defederate is important because there are instances that host csam and other illegal things. That content federating across all instances could put some instance owners in legal jeopardy and is undesirable even without legal considerations. Beyond filtering illegal content and large amounts of spam I prefer to curate my own experience. That’s why I chose lemm.ee. It’s a general purpose instance with a good admin that is generally well moderated. Lemm.ee doesn’t tend to cause problems for other instances so few instances have defederated from it and it basically only defederates instances that host illegal material or copious amounts of spam.
Not everyone wants that same experience though. The amount of political posts and doom posting can get overwhelming and depressing. Constantly seeing posts that challenge or attempt to invalidate parts of you identity gets exhausting. More controlled and curated instances can be a nice break from the full experience. Anytime I’ve interacted with beehaw communities it has been pleasant and much less stressful than the general lemmy community. I can understand why some users prefer to stay in that environment for all of their time on lemmy. This is ultimately recreation, users should enjoy their experience here. The same with blahaj, it’s nice to sometimes see content concerning minority identities without there being the same debates in the comments. When I interact with communities there and see how they talk about things I learn and grow as a person. Those discussions wouldn’t be possible on a less controlled instance.
The problem is that Lemmy is already small and niche. I don’t want my account or communities to go poof one day because a small instance admin gives up or forgets about their project. I’ve actually seen users go through this several times.
I get the idea in theory, but in practice, it doesn’t end up panning out well.
Self hosting is a thing, sure, but a lot of people don’t at all want to do that.
In addition to splitting up communities to the point where you have to follow multiple of the same community in different instances to get more than a slice of the content.
To reduce centralization. The more spread out things are the less vulnerable Lemmy is to a major loss if an instance shuts down and the less power any single admin has.
Ok…but, how do you promote these smaller communities on smaller instances to a greater audience then?
!newcommunities@lemmy.world helps. You can also post about them in related communities if the community rules allow and communities can partner with each other to link in community sidebars.
The same way you do any other instance just be there for the mods. Update it regulary even if you are the only one to make the instance updating it.
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I still don’t understand the point of DEfederating communities, if the individual users have the ability to block communities from their own personal experiences.
I see a community I don’t like? I can block it. But why should everybody have to not see it because it goes against MY views?
But then on the other side of things, I can’t move to another host instance, because all my comments won’t migrate with my profile. Right now I’m hosted on Lemmy.World. And if I transfer my account to another instance, it should say all previous comments would say “Lost_My_Mind@(new instance) Via Lemmy.world”. But it doesn’t. So now I’m stuck here.
You cannot defederate from a “community”, but you can have your specific user account block either a community or an entire instance (to varying degrees of effectiveness - you can still see posts from people on those instances, and chat with them, but you won’t receive “notifications” from them anymore).
Defederation from an “instance” is meant as a last-resort effort to avoid an enormous amount of moderation work, like if it keeps sending child porn across the Fediverse, or users are overwhelmingly harassing others or something.
Here, you can read about such occurrences directly from the sources involved (who chose to do it) like https://hexbear.net/post/1712067, and then various responses in return like https://programming.dev/post/2652745 (tldr: hexbear defederated from them, so they defederated in return to avoid people getting confused from one-sided conversations where messages could be sent but never received) and https://lemm.ee/comment/2155764 etc.
And yes, you are stuck at your current instance if you care about keeping your account. You can copy your rules like block list from one user account to another though, like I have an alt at StarTrek.online, which mitigates somewhat the pain of having to move. If someone were to try to send me a DM at my old one though, I would not get it at the new account - instead I would have to keep both active, forever. It turns out that the idea that you can move freely around the Fediverse was a lie - or at least, it is something that isn’t fully implemented yet. Theoretically it is something that could be done, if someone were to bother to implement that, but it hasn’t been done yet.
All of Lemmy is still beta software. It helps to lower expectations:-). It is still 1000x better than Reddit imho, b/c of (a) no ads and lack of other forms of enshittification as well (e.g. automatically playing videos that you cannot stop with a setting somewhere), (b) the people are more worth talking to here (generally speaking; except those places that tend to be defederated by the major instances, b/c of all the harassment they kept doing).
I don’t think account mobility was ever an expectstion until recently, just that you could access all federated instances from any instance. I can ‘move freely’ with my account to any federated instance without needing separate logins.
iirc, it was one of the points sold to people as we migrated away from Reddit during the exodus. But I like your more precise phrasing of what it actually is.:-) More was told during the exodus though, e.g. “just as Reddit is falling, if the instance you pick likewise falls, then you can move your account to another one”, i.e. it barely matters which instance you picked at first, so just jump in and see. But different language may have been used at different times and places - e.g. the expectations of people already here vs. the newly incoming ones (like me:-).
I have limited agreement with your thoughts on defederation. The ability to defederate is important because there are instances that host csam and other illegal things. That content federating across all instances could put some instance owners in legal jeopardy and is undesirable even without legal considerations. Beyond filtering illegal content and large amounts of spam I prefer to curate my own experience. That’s why I chose lemm.ee. It’s a general purpose instance with a good admin that is generally well moderated. Lemm.ee doesn’t tend to cause problems for other instances so few instances have defederated from it and it basically only defederates instances that host illegal material or copious amounts of spam.
Not everyone wants that same experience though. The amount of political posts and doom posting can get overwhelming and depressing. Constantly seeing posts that challenge or attempt to invalidate parts of you identity gets exhausting. More controlled and curated instances can be a nice break from the full experience. Anytime I’ve interacted with beehaw communities it has been pleasant and much less stressful than the general lemmy community. I can understand why some users prefer to stay in that environment for all of their time on lemmy. This is ultimately recreation, users should enjoy their experience here. The same with blahaj, it’s nice to sometimes see content concerning minority identities without there being the same debates in the comments. When I interact with communities there and see how they talk about things I learn and grow as a person. Those discussions wouldn’t be possible on a less controlled instance.
What is csam, and do I want to google it? Or was that “spam” as a typo?
Child Sexual Abuse Material.
Child sexual assault material, no you don’t want to google it.
Glad I asked and didn’t put that into my search history!
Child porn. It’s the euphemism treadmill.
Interesting read, thanks!
The problem is that Lemmy is already small and niche. I don’t want my account or communities to go poof one day because a small instance admin gives up or forgets about their project. I’ve actually seen users go through this several times.
I get the idea in theory, but in practice, it doesn’t end up panning out well.
Self hosting is a thing, sure, but a lot of people don’t at all want to do that.
It also leads to most sub instances being so small they’re effectively unmoderated
In addition to splitting up communities to the point where you have to follow multiple of the same community in different instances to get more than a slice of the content.
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