I have been on reddit for just about 12 years now. Something I’ve noticed over time is just how hateful the place has become. A complete outrage machine. Every single sub became filled with it. I’ve filtered so many subreddits over the last few years, it’s insane. I don’t know enough about this place to be sure, but I do hope it doesn’t become the same type of echo chamber of anger.
I don’t think it’ll happen. That’s why this will work, because the fediverse has controls for this. Say the folks over at another lemmy instance start hosting communities that are allowing hateful content, if you’re on lemmy.world you can count on the devs there to defederate that instance, and then it completely disappears from your view. It’s important to understand that you could still go directly over to the web portal for that instance and still see the content, but after they’ve been defederated, you’d have to a make an account on their server to interact with their content because all the reputable or safe instances will block them. So then it’s up to mods, like always. So if someone starts a community at lemmy.world then starts allowing hate speech in their community, I believe the devs at lemmy.world can simply nuke the whole community in one swipe, plus probably delete any accounts on lemmy.world that were engaging with the deleted community. I’m just learning so correct me if I’m wrong, but these sets of checks and balances seem to me to create an environment like a salty lake that will prevent certain things from growing, like the widespread douchebaggery that infested Reddit like a kudzu vine.
I’m brand new to Lemmy and the fediverse and not very familiar with how all this works. If I have an account here and they defederate someone else, that means it doesn’t show up in the fediverse feed here? But can I still view it if I search for it explicitly?
If the owners of your instance (you’re on Lemmy.world) blocks another instance, then you would have to go to the other “instance” (effectively, their actual website) to view the content. You would have to make an account at their instance to interact with the content on their site.
Alternatively, you could also make an account with a different lemmy instance (or kbin/etc.) that federates with them (but I didn’t wanna complicate the above explanation too much.)
This is not quite true. All content from that instance that was interacted with, subbed communities, commented or upvoted posts get copied to the local instance. If the local instance defederated the bad instance, the copied content from the bad instance stays and is visible, communities, posts, all of it. It simply is no longer receiving new stuff from the bad instance. Lemmy.world is defederated from Beehaw.org. You can still see Beehaw’s communities from Lemmy.world but they don’t have any updates from Beehaw since the defederation.
Lemmy instance admins can purge other communities, users, and whatnot. This+defederation will remove them from their instances entirely
Got it, thanks! I’ve been looking at kbin too and there’s a lot of crossover it seems. Is kbin its own thing or is it another aspect of lemmy (or vice-versa)?
Kbin is very early access, but they are just different website software that essentially do the same thing - which is to communicate with other networking instances in “the fediverse” through a shared “protocol” called Activity Pub. The diagram of the tree in the linked wikipedia might help you visualise it.
Kbin includes a “microblogging” aspect as it is trying to also incorporate Mastodon (decentralised twitter) as well. There’s other software too like Peertube (decentralised Youtube) and Pixelfed (decentralised images) but I dunno how well they all interact with each other yet.
I’m not 100% sure yet. Try this https://lemmy.plasmatrap.com/post/7752
Thank you for that link! Since everything is so new I appreciate finding out more about individual instances.
yw. It seems you can defederate lemmy instances, individual users, and communities all separately. Like I said, I’m still figuring it out, now between beers at a bbq on the 4th (USA here), and these idiots think I’m texting a girl on the sly, but I’m just furiously reading about the fediverse like I’m going to war there next week.