I'm pretty sure this is what caused beehaw to defederate lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Several pro-reddit people posted to reddit (on a sub that is now private) about doing just that. It worked and took 48 hours or less for beehaw to defederate them. But there was a lot of discussion about the situation across several servers and it doesnt really seem to have worked to fracture the community other than isolating beehaw which already wanted to be fairly isolated to begin with.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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sh.itjust.works Main Community
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Home of the sh.itjust.works instance.
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Do you have a recommend server? I just joined the latter one, does that mean I won't be able to participate in certain communities?
The first thing I saw on this site was "you're a N*"** F***" which isn't a great sign..
I tried signing up to multiple different instances I guess? The first few were full. I'm new here and just want to make sure I'm at the right place, not loving that the first thing I see is pretty racist and homophobic
Try joining smaller instances. It's nice if they are run by people with good reputation in the libre world. I'm in lemmy.sdf.org and it's pretty good.
If you don't want to see any kind of offensive content, I recommend signing up to Beehaw. It's a self proclaimed "safe space". This means that they actively delete offensive content, they do not allow nsfw, and they defederate from any instance they see as a danger to this safe space.
You can also browse instances from join-lemmy.org and look at their blocked instances. If you see instances that block many or some major instances that are right wing or promote things you don't like, you'll know you found the right place that will disallow offensiveness in your feed. :)
If you scroll to the bottom of the page there is a link called "Instances", there you can see all the federated and defederated instances of the instance you are currently on.
Instead of defederating whole servers, I would like admins to have an “opt out” or “un-default” button, then each user can browse the list of servers that have been opted out and individually opt in again instead of having to move their username to a different server.
I would grudgingly accept having the ability to op-in to "problematic" instances or communities. As long as I'm not denied any functionality. It's an acceptable compromise.
That's much better than opt out, the default shouldn't direct you to hateful communities
this
instead of having to move their username to a different server.
IMO this is a separate problem; I'd like the ability to move my account between servers and preserve my comment history and subscriptions.
The comment history migration will not happen. Subscription migration tools exist but are limited, and I am sure they will grow more prolific in the future, because the tools for it are getting better.
It's not feasible with the way fedi software works.
I admit it's more complicated than it first seems, and I'm not deeply familiar with the ActivityPub protocol, but could you elaborate on why it wouldn't be feasible to extend AP to support user account migration?
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We did not thrive amongst trolls on Reddit. Reddit banned and contained certain subreddits. It works. It made the platform a better place for everyone else. Defederation accomplishes the same thing
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Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but this whole thing is starting to sound like "don't interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." Was it rigged from the start? For a couple of days everyone was civil and in less than a week, "Let's Get Ready toooo RUMBLE"!
Was there another way?
I don't see anyone being uncivil, not sure what you mean.
a decentralized platform (aka fediverse) is already divided, that's just the nature of how it's set up.
the real issue is that, by trying to create "safe" spaces (as beehaw did), defederating all instances that challenge that mindset just creates insular and rather meaningless echo chambers.
ultimately, this platform will devolve into close minded communities
I understand that it's a technicas issue that we have to have instances with a lot of people on them right now so that the more technically inclined people can set up the software so that the others can just use it. But the problem is that when it is like that then there are two sides of the problem, users have no control over their content and what they can consume and admins can be responsible for things the users do/post.
I really hope that in the future there will be some technology which would be able to live without central sevrers but instead it would be a p2p sollution which would replicate itself onto your devices where you want to have it. Only then we'll be able to be autonomous enough.
We have bittorrent with the magnet links which are only a couple of bytes big, back in the day I kind of suspected that on top of something like that we would build p2p social networks, but it never happened, I'm not sure why.
It’s data cost. Private torrent sites are the exception, but most people who torrent don’t continue to seed for a long time, which means that availability is low and the bandwidth cost is usually split among just a handful of users with a seedbox, which is basically getting back to the idea of a server. How do you motivate people to use up their bandwidth and pay for the extra electricity to keep the availability and speed reasonable?
The most similar thing I can think of to what you’re talking about is i2p, but that comes with all the speed and connnectivity problems that are commonplace for the dark web, and the vast majority of mainstream users have no interest in engaging with a complicated P2P network that serves content at speeds that make you feel like you’re living in 2003.
Unless the mindset of the general computer user changes, we are unlikely to see any system take off that doesn’t rely on a central team of motivated people to do the backend work that the users simply don’t want to worry about.
I would love to see an actual protocol like email or torrents replacing all social media. Then we wouldn't have to rely on admins to protect us from the baddies, or graciously allow us access to each other. We could just block rude people, and subscribe to interesting people.
Email is probably the technology where admins have to do the most to protect you from the baddies.
The problem is really inherent in any technology that allows anyone to contact anyone else without pre-screening (like an add to friendslist feature most messengers have).
Yeah I was just about to say. What do they think a spam filter is but admins protecting you. This isn't even talking about the trust system within emails where you can't email someone al all basically if your email server isn't trusted and configured correctly.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC policies, DMARC reporting, ARC, DNS RBLs for IPs and Domains, Bayesian spam filters, various honeypots, systems for exchanging user spam reports, virus scanners, MTA-STS and SMTP TLS reporting,...
I doubt there is any other technology that has spawned this many technologies to protect users from bad actors.
Wait, email is basically exactly lika ActivityPub, it also relies on servers like outlook, gmail and so on. And those servers have to have admins and those admins do block other servers because of all the spam.
They block spam, they don't block servers just because people are emailing shitposts or being politically incorrect.
Blocking spam servers is totally different from blocking "problematic" servers.
RBL’s are nothing more than a way to block problematic servers. And some of those problems are nothing more than they don’t have a rdns.
That's not due to technical differences though. Blocking/defederating is entirely up to the admins, so it's more of a cultural issue than technical. If a social media network was built around SMTP (email) it would see the same censorship debate were seeing with ActivityPub (Lemmy, etc).
Exactly. While lemmy does need better tools to help mitigate the problem on a more granular level, at the end of the day if you have a lot of spam coming from one instance then defederating from that instance will always be a valid option.
Spam servers constitute a technical issue so I think that defederating them is entirely different from just defederating instances that allow trolls and right wingers (or centrists or whatever).
the whole point of fediverse is that everyone should spin up their own instance. if everyone just joins someone else's server, it kinda defeats the purpose.
and yea, if i was them, i would also create a bunch of accounts to spam non-leftwing-moderated instances with racist and nazi stuff to give them ammunition for defederation, just like they do on 4chan
edit: addendum: activity pub sucks
How about embrace and enshittyfy like Google Talk did with XMPP?
Porque no los dos?
I'm okay with blocking corporate instances because they'll find a way to do top-down domination. But I don't want some admin stepping between me and other posters.
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I imagine the Fediverse isn't really a threat? They can play the long game and probably don't care about the amount of people who left. There's not much to gain bringing us down either since we'll just migrate somewhere else.
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dis gon be gud
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