In the spirit of being encouraged to speak my mind here’s a slight effort post:
Defederation does not do what you think it does.
The instance creator and admins are those with the ultimate power within their instance. The active users delegate them that power by interacting with their instance.
Defining “defederation” within the context of Lemmy as I understand it:
“the act of denying the ability for accounts within specific instances to interact with each other”
Anyone at this current time can create an account on most instances. One site on sh.itjust.works is defederated right now, but anyone here may also have an account there, who knows? The value comes from our activity and interaction within each instance.
Defederation is a narrow and a slippery slope because it doesn’t actually solve any problems. There are many instances which are doing things I think should be banned. I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.
We uphold an inclusive enjoyable community here by being active. Individuals with malicious intent are ostracized naturally by an active community. Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.
It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.
There are bot instances cropping up that absolutely must be defederated in order to keep the platform viable.
This is actually one of the things I think de-federation is meant for. Anybody can stand up an instance and use it to post spam.
De-federation is a useful tool to cut off such an instance without having to grow your ban list by orders of magnitude.
Strongly agree, the ghost instances with 10k bot accounts are going to cause a problem sooner rather than later, but its extremely easy to defederate them and we should probably do so ASAP.
I’m sure it’ll be an ongoing battle basically forever.
Likely, eventually, instances will have extra software running to synchronize de-federation of spam networks as they pop up. That way each instance benefits from the other admin’s work on spam detection.
Perhaps we can take a page from the adblock world and have open source defederated lists of bot instances. Unfortunately, this is still a cat and mouse game.
Developers should definitely start figuring out how to implement anti-bot systems. You can’t just use that though. You also need to have an active community that self moderates and purges bots when they’re seen. There is no way to stop bots entirely and efforts to do so would alienate users and lead to the decline of activity.
News flash genius.
Bots can run their own instances. And those instances can be used to interact with the rest of the Fediverse.
Doesn’t matter if your instance takes measures to stop bots signing up when they’ve just created 10,000 accounts on a VPS they spun up and spammed every other federated instance.
Dude, this isn’t Reddit. Chill with the attacks. Instead of getting your point across, you’re just going to get downvoted.
Also, it goes against the rules of this community. Be respectful in your disagreement. Courtesy goes a long way to having a real discussion, not a shouting fest like Reddit usually devolved into.
This is a good example of why limiting the ability of users from outside this instance to participate in this community might be a good idea (he’s a kbinner).
I can only assume that this gentleman had been recently watching the suburbs episode of IASIP, and came in a bit hot. So he’s fine.
But I think he may not have recognized what this community is or that it’s a meant to be a more polite forum than the general fediverse, or even the sh.itjust.works Main community. It’s better to put up a thin barrier so that people don’t wander in here unaware and get downvoted and derail the discussion.
I don’t know about limiting users from outside, I think it’s kind of fun. “News flash genius” gave me a good laugh lol. Also, people will just make accounts here if they can’t interact from other accounts.
We can discuss going forward. Even a very slight barrier to entry could be very helpful.
I would encourage that honestly. Then they’re at least making themselves more part of the community.
Your rhetoric really leaves something to be desired. You are your own worst enemy in trying to persuade people of your opinions.
True, this is very important!
and those that desire to brigade other communities like lemmy.grad. I think any instance that allows drawings/art of underaged people should also be defederated.
Staying in federation with an instance that actively embraces bad actors increases the visibility of users here to those bad actors, and gives them access to our community. Defederating such an instance is a basic best practice in the Fediverse.
More importantly for those who wring their hands about not limiting the whole community – failure to defederate from bad actor instances will be factored in when good productive instances with content folks here want to see decide whether to defederate us. (Remember that this place is already defederated by one prominent instance, which is a material detriment to users here.)
It is reasonable and normal to disagree about where the line is drawn in terms of what instances deserve defederation. It’s often ambiguous what’s a normal instance with sloppy moderation and a few bad apples[1] versus what’s a place that is run by and for bad actors.
There’s a wide range of standards that can be applied. It seems like the general vibe can be broken down into three groups:
- Only defederate spammers and child porn
- Only defederate spammers child porn and tankies
- Defederate spammers child porn, tankies, and rampantly fascist troll farms
I don’t think anyone has really advocated for anything aggressive than that on here (could be wrong)
Although also important to remember that the point of the bad apples thing is that they spoil the whole batch if you don’t take them out. ↩︎
I just want to append that a “rampantly fascist troll farm” would be something like The Stormfront, which hosts literal neo-nazis, or possibly 4chan’s /pol/ forum, where Jewish conspiracies are blamed for all the world’s ills and… only maybe 1/2 to 2/3 of the users are saying that ironically. These are real websites with real people, and if you are used to Reddit as your main social media, I would urge you to take a look just once and get an example of what actual hate speech looks like. That is, illegal in the UK, or could be used as evidence to increase the sentence in conjunction with a guilty verdict for violent crime in the US. Trumptard/trans-skeptic is no the same as rampantly fascist.
I only ask to reserve the use of the word for two reasons. One, the real thing is out there and we shouldn’t forget it. Two, accusing someone of attempting a fascist takeover of the government which would end democracy… is a pretty good excuse to take over the government and end democracy. It’s the same sort of thing as saying someone’s words are “violent” towards you in an attempt to justify (real) violence towards them.
Staying in federation with an instance that actively embraces bad actors increases the visibility of users here to those bad actors, and gives them access to our community.
It’s not our job of shielding others from bad thoughts because they may be swayed by them. And you are denying those who aren’t swayed to interct with those thoughts if they so choose.
Then why can’t a person who wants that just make an account on that server?
Or better yet, if someone so cherishes that idea of federation with everyone then just stand up their own server.
Because “just host your own server” is not an appropriate response to someone just wanting to interact with people they disagree with. And if I’m forced to make multiple accounts just to interact with all the communities, then Lemmy is no better than separate forums and there is a very good reason why Reddit was way more successful than those forums.
Not to mention, most of those instances require you to write a paragraph just to get the account approved, which is something I’m not going to do just to give counter to some users of that instance.
I think server owners might have a different opinion of their ultimate goal. Being “more successful” than Reddit probably isn’t it for a lot of them.
But hey, that’s part and parcel of it. You can’t control the fediverse unless you’re the one hosting it. I’m ok with server admins making the choice to defed or not. Their instances will grow or die accordingly. Ie. Vote with your feet.
If Lemmy wants to be a credible alternative to Reddit, which I think it should be, then there needs to be a certain level of stability. If instances block each other left and right, then normal user will just get confused and leave. And your used software can be as open source and free as you like, if your friends use WhatsApp, Twitter and Discord, you will have to have too, if you want to stay in touch with them.
If you don’t want to host your own server, then why do you think you should be able to dictate what someone else who does host their own server, and allowed you to join it for free, should do with it?
I think if we drill down to the real issue here, it’s really this: How much control should an instance have over what it’s users see and interact with?
Some folks want to be the ones to decide for themselves what they see and interact with, with minimal to no interference by the admin.
Other folks don’t want to see or deal with objectionable material, and want the admin to ensure they don’t have to.
I think the answer is somewhere between, myself. As others have pointed out, botnet instances and instances with illegal material should be defederated without mercy. Instances with little to no moderation and users that are causing problems on other instances should be considered for defederation too.
Whether to consider other cases of defederation is where it gets greyer to me. An instance that has communities that post questionable stuff, but doesn’t break that instances rules, is one such grey area. And to be clear, I’m making the case that those communities and questionable stuff live on that instance.
To other folks, that wouldn’t be grey, and I guess that’s what we’re really discussing.
Is it possible to ban an instance from my user level? That is, can I prevent myself from seeing their posts and comments on this and other instances? If so, then Blocklists might be the way to go. Sign up for a “no Nazis” list or whatever.
This is the real answer I think. Users should be treated like adults who are capable of determining by themselves what content they are comfortable with seeing.
If I don’t want to see an extremist political community on my feed, I block that community myself. If an instance is full of such communities, I block that instance myself.
I don’t want or need some other random on the internet to make judgement calls on what content I can or cannot interact with.
Defederation is a tactical nuke, that if used incorrectly will destroy the freedom, decentralization and openness of Lemmy, and replace it with a far more centralized series of walled gardens.
I fear that people are trying to recreate the reddit model on Lemmy. Lemmy is not reddit, Lemmy is better than reddit. Reddit is top down, Lemmy is bottom up. We don’t need more mod control, we need more user control.
I would love to see more features built for user moderation of content. Perhaps I could subscribe to another users blocklist, or follow their ‘recommended communities’. Instances themselves could maintain suggested block lists, and users could chose to enable or disable them at their own discretion.
Honestly, I’m not sure that defederation has any place at all. Even things like spam and bot instances I think would be better handled by a blocklist (enabled by default even), that users can turn on or off as they see fit.
Why are you trying to view everything and ban things you don’t like instead of viewing your subscriptions and only joining communities you do like?
I want to see what communities are out there and active. I’d rather not be stuck in a walled garden of my own making. My default sort is currently Local/Active, but I’m still playing with it.
I also want to see communities out there, but instances defederating makes it a whole hell of a lot harder because it kills visibility of those instances. I don’t want to have to swap between a handful of accounts to just have basic functionality all because moralizing assholes want this to be like reddit
Yes, you can block users. Click the 3 dots on my comment and then hit that little 🚫 symbol, and boom, I’m blocked.
Yes it does. That’s why it’s in the spec. They built it for a reason.
Imagine 1,000 Russian bot and fascist trolls servers with 100,000 users each. There’s 20 major Lemmy servers now. And you expect us all to self-defend and block this onslaught?
Also: email servers work this way now. They “defederate” known spam servers all the time. For the same reason.
Why do you expect for even 1 Russian to be interested in trolling Lemmy considering how rare they were even on reddit? And those who were, they like, mostly not trolls.
I think I agree. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of going too far, too fast in defederating from servers which have people whose views some users here find objectionable. There are some cases where it’s fairly clear-cut, and I’d feel comfortable. Outright fascists and MAGA servers. Bot-farms. Ones designed to disseminate disinformation and fake news.
If their users are interacting with us in ways which are hostile, disruptive, etc. then we should defederate, obviously. Though that will only go so far given open registrations.
But this server is not, as far as I’m aware, intended to be of a specific political hue, nor primarily about politics. So, I think we should be cautious and careful, partly because I’ve seen ‘tankie’ used to describe such a wide range of views, often with very little in common between them.
So what you’re suggesting works in theory, but not in practice. There are times when simply ignoring bad actors or voting them down within a community is not enough to stop them from misbehaving. Try ostracizing a botnet. Or nicely asking trolls to stop posting racist memes. It won’t work.
Oh no, what I’m suggesting is that we can’t stop them from here. On sh.itjust.works the best we can do is self-moderate. It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances, and defederating is a bad attempt to do so. Defederating from any instance that has a racist meme is not a good way to deal with that, simply self-moderating well on sh.itjust.works is the best way.
As for botnets that’s another story, spam should be against the rules regardless.
Communities within sh.itjust.works seem to be well moderated thus far, and that’s great to see.
That’s kind of the crux of the issue though, you keep saying “instances should self-moderate” but then you say “defederating an instance that is not properly self moderating is not a good way to deal with that”. What exactly do you propose to do then if an instance is not self moderating enough?
Exactly. When TendieMaster69 says “self-moderate” I think defedding should 100% be a part of that self-moderation toolkit. That’s all defedding is - an instance saying “nope, we’re done with your b.s.” I don’t see why that should be off the table.
But “shouldn’t stop them from here” and “self-moderate” are in conflict with one another. What is self-moderation if an entire instance is troll farm, or hate group? Should that self-moderation not include defedding as an option?
If I have a party in my house and a bunch of rowdy people show up, I have a series of escalating options to stop the problem ranging from asking one of them to stop, to kicking the entire group out of my house and never letting them come back. Defedding is the last of those, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be an option when other methods are not working.Great analogy. Kudos.
Fuck, no.
If someone wants a racist memes community, expect to be ostracised for it by the other instances who aren’t fuckwits.
Bingo, if they tolerate it they’re encouraging it, if we also tolerate them then…
Defederation deprives me of the ability to respond to people from defederated instances, not only on their instance, but everywhere. Case in point, I’d like to respond to this doofus from lemmygrad, but I can’t, because lemmygrad is defederated.
No it doesn’t. Go join lemmygrad if you want to talk to them.
For the other instance’s users they would still be able to see our communities and post replies in threads but only users from their own instance would see their messages so in the end the majority would think our communities are just dead and that would be the end of it.
Only a minority would go through the trouble of creating a second account just to troll and the few that would would be easier to moderate than a whole instance worth of users.
The experience on all other social medias show that it just doesn’t work to try and coexist with extremists and a feat like askhistorians requires a team of mods with someone there pretty much 24/7 to watch what’s going on and to automatically ban Holocaust deniers (for example)… And that was only one subreddit!
Only a minority would go through the trouble of creating a second account just to troll
I have a lot of accounts. I have an account here, I have a Reddit account, one at Facebook, Twitter, etc. I have a password manager filled with more accounts than I could name if I had to. If this space balkanizes then I’ll have accounts covering most of the space. The assholes will too.
In some ways not defederating might be smarter from a troll management perspective. Banning an account (from another instance) from posting here while leaving them able see content would likely result in fewer trolls just making accounts here than if they had to make an account to just see the content. Just shadowban the nazis and the tankies and the other bastards rather than making a big concern out of the existence of the other instances.
It would be good if we could ban content from other instances from showing up in “All” without full defederation though. And that’s not even entirely about bad actors. I don’t want to defederate from lemmynsfw but I also don’t want it in my All.
You just didn’t read what I said…
Defederating is equivalent to shadow banning the whole instance. I can still check out Beehaw and reply to threads there, the only difference is that only people from sh.itjust.works can see my comments and reply to me.
Also, having multiple accounts on separate social media is different from having multiple accounts on the same social media and the majority of people don’t bother having multiple accounts, especially if they can still see and “participate” in the discussions where they’re banned.
Ah, I stand corrected. I did not realize users from defederated instances could still subscribe and view content new content. I thought updates ended at the time of defederation.
Many thought the same but on my end I can still see new content on Beehaw
I just subbed to something on Beehaw. Worked fine! Thanks for letting me know. I really thought defederation was a much more aggressive split.
Pending
I can still see new posts and we you saw in another discussion where I provided a link for you, I replied in threads and my message was seen by people in the same instance as me.
Yeah, I know. :3
I dunno how your app works, but does beehaw-gaming show up on your frontpage or do you have to manually look for it?
I don’t understand the point you are trying to make. On the one hand, you say:
Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.
This makes me think you are saying not to defederate because it would be better to call out bad behavior - interact with the bad actors and point out their falsehoods, hate, etc. But on the other hand, you say:
I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.
and
It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.
These make me think you are saying just ignore them. And if we’re going to just ignore them, how is that different from the perspective of the bad actors, from defederating? How does not moderating and not interacting stop bad actors?
This is all new to me, I don’t know the best use of defederating, but I didn’t follow the argument you were making.
Defederating entire instances does not stop bad actors, but an active strongwilled community does.
Defederating doesn’t stop bad actors from making an account here, an active strongwilled community here can self-moderate regardless.
I don’t interact with them. I don’t provide them with any value.
I don’t go to instances I don’t like which I think are shitty and filled with assholes. By doing so I would be giving the instance creators/admins value. If they come here then they can easily be banned by community moderators and admins here.
It’s not our responsibility to moderate other instances.
We cannot moderate other instances from sh.itjust.works, and defederating is a bad attempt to do so. The best we can do is not interact with them (post/comment on their instances), and instead moderate well here.
Thank you, I see your point now. You are worried bad actors could simply join this instance.
They could, but then they would fall under the guidelines and moderation of this instance. I’m not sure in practice how big of a worry this is.
And bad actors can join without needing to come from a banned instance.
This doesn’t change my view of defederation. (I won’t claim to know the correct use/threshold for defederation, this is all new to me! I’m mostly here to enjoy the discussions, not worry about what might go wrong.)
Defederating is made exactly for removing bad actors.
I agree with you.
Agreed. While there are cases where de-federation is needed it’s an option of last resort. The risk of balkanization is too great.
Yea that’s a great way to put it.
I think from our instances view point it doesn’t matter as much because as you said we have open registration. Having that open registration is what has led to us being defederated by other instances however with a longer approval process. So in the lens of the whole, they make use of that.
As for the purposes of us defederating an instance it would be
- bots/spams as others have said
- legal issues as part of the federation is importing that content posted by that instance (so I think having references to that content could make us vulnerable to issues with it). Again not sure on this one but for performance reasons could see the implementation being as such.
Shit centrist take.
If a community doesn’t want to interact with a different one, let them not.
This whole “awww you shouldn’t ban people from the community, it’s just words so just ignore them” reeks of the shit Nazis complain about after getting banned.
I don’t necessarily get centrist take from this, just a PSA that defederation isn’t a super ban hammer.
OP seems to be saying that there are more efficient ways to duck unwanted content than by playing whack a mole with the whole instance. I’m not sure that’s an endorsement of said content.
Holy shit yes you get it, thank you.
sir I prefer lemmy garlic
Nothing wrong with being a centrist.
You’ll find in many countries worldwide centrism is the norm. Try to keep in mind that your country’s local definitions are not the same.
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