Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.

I’ve been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to “lemmy” as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.

For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw’s communities are “owned” by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances’ content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw “owns” the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.

This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.

Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren’t going to read technical documentation?

  • Hotchpotch@beehaw.orgEnglish
    242·
    1 year ago

    By that line of reasoning all alt-right, homophobe, harassing, doxxing, trolling etc. instances should be allowed to access every other instance to spread their hate. Is that really what you want? I don’t.

    • trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      Why do you think entire instances will be devoted to that? You will have to block every instance that has open registration, since any open instance cannot guarantee one of the people you mentioned will not come in. I guess the issue I have is that I see moderation as something between users and communities. Not that the overall instance should be doing the moderation.

      • cnnrduncan@beehaw.orgEnglish
        22·
        1 year ago

        Because entire instances have already devolved to that and thus been blocked by the wider fediverse.

          • panoptic@kbin.social
            4·
            1 year ago

            On some level I think you’re both right - this is roughly the problem that happened with email and spam.

            At one point it was trivial to run your own Mailserver, this got harder and harder as issues with spam got worse. Places started black holing servers they didn’t know and trust, this drove ever more centralization and a need for server level monitoring/moderation because a few bad actors could get a whole server blocked.

            We can know that bad actors will exist, both at the user and at the server level. We can also know that this has a history of driving centralization. All of this should be kept in mind as the community discusses and designs moderation tools.

            Ideally, I hope we can settle on systems and norms that allow small leaf nodes to exist and interconnect while also keeping out bad actors.

        • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgMEnglish
          8·
          1 year ago

          yeah this is like everything on our defederation list besides lemmygrad, shitjustworks, and lemmyworld–we’re literally using a block list which is dedicated to those kinds of instances

          • Freeman@lemmy.pubEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            Is there a central place to track these instances?. Or do you all have a text list or the reasons you defederated some that you may be open to sharing (even privately). I was looking for something specifically to avoid things like illegal content and the like.

              • Freeman@lemmy.pubEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Nice thanks. Added those to my list at least. Beehaw has a ton, and frankly I dont even want to click through some on grounds of well…CSAM stuff ala burggit.moe etc

              • TKilFree@beehaw.orgEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                You might be interested to know that, as luck would have it, this was the first issue I picked up when scrolling through looking for a good introductory task to get used to the project: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3168

                So this might change in the not-too-distant future (I haven’t started doing any frontend work to support it yet though).

            • PenguinTD@lemmy.caEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              I think a blind trust of such list is kinda dangerous. But a common place where admins and user can tag and rate instances and hosted communities can be a good start.

              • Freeman@lemmy.pubEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Agree. Kinda what I was asking/looking for.

                I’m a bit new to running an instance. There seem to be tools created for finding instances and communities. But not something that does the above.

              • Freeman@lemmy.pubEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Yeah i see that, but that doesnt really list the reasons some were removed. So prior to @alyaza@beehaw.org’s comment I was kinda wondering why some may or may not have been dropped from beehaw.

                • rs5th@lemmy.scottlabs.ioEnglish
                  6·
                  1 year ago

                  There’s no function in lemmy to track reasons in the admin interface, it’s a text box where you pass in a list of blocked instances. The Beehaw admins may maintain a list separately.

                  • Freeman@lemmy.pubEnglish
                    3·
                    1 year ago

                    Im aware. Thats why I was asking the admin if they were open to sharing such a possible list, even privately. It would help me save time. Heck it could be a github list we could share (again even privately) if I ran across new instances. They are sprouting up all over the place, mines not really an exception there either.

        • trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          We sure, I can understand Defederation from “skinheads.social”. I’m more concerned with large instances like lemmy.world who just are rather wide-open. I wonder if large open instances are just bad.

          • cnnrduncan@beehaw.orgEnglish
            6·
            1 year ago

            The Admins here have been pretty open about the fact that they’re keen on re-federating with large instances once better moderation tools are available!

            • ResidualBit@beehaw.orgEnglish
              6·
              1 year ago

              That’s exactly it. Open signups and the volume that comes with that just highlights the lack of comprehensive moderation tools at the moment, certainly within instances, but also cross-instance - lots of very active conversations happening on this front though!

      • gh0stcassette@kbin.social
        3·
        1 year ago

        There totally are fascist instances though, and I think defederating from those is cool and good. I’m not thrilled about the beehaw defederation either, but I respect the mods’ decision, especially since it’s targeted only at the two instances with users who were actually causing problems and I can still access beehaw communities from my non lemmy.world accounts