this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I agree, this is kinda hurting the fediverse.
I came here because I happened to see a post on lemmynsfw (coming from lemmy.world through federation) about Threads, and I was looking to reply from beehaw (because replying with a lemmynsfw account gives a certain "flair" of course) so I was looking for that post here. But I couldn't find it anywhere. Then I started looking into the reason here. Then I found this post which explained it.
But I think it's important to realise that this way the fediverse will stay very niche and fragmented. It would be better to let the users have a choice who they want to see. And defederate only in very heavy situations (for example, nobody would expect beehaw to federate with gab.com because they support actual total nazis). But blocking lemmy.world as one of the biggest instances is... strange.
The thing is, I came here as a new user because spez makes reddit so inhospitable with his dick moves. So I went to https://join-lemmy.org/ and found beehaw. (well in fact I went to lemmy.ml first but didn't like the attitude there). But join-lemmy doesn't describe this whole complex fabric of defederation, it appears as if I could see the whole fediverse from beehaw. Because lemmy.world is a really major instance this is a little bit disingenous. For a new user like me (and a very technical one) this is really hard to grasp. And will lead to users being put off.
I think this whole fragmentation thing is a much bigger threat to the fediverse than Threads is to be honest.
I saw the same on Mastodon, with a lot of German sites instantly blocking federation as soon as another instance doesn't copy exactly the same set of rules word for word (so no incidents are even necessary). In my opinion this hurts the fediverse a lot. As a user I don't want to maintain accounts everywhere, the whole point of ActivityPub was not having to do that.
And don't forget that not all communities on lemmy.world might necessarily bad. Reddit itself is full of toxic communities like the old the_donald (now banned of course). But also really good ones. The same is true for lemmy.world. By by defederating we're blocking the chance of even seeing them.