It’d be nice if the admins got everyone’s input on these sorts of things. Admins making decisions without thought to our opinions is what drove us here from reddit. I’m not going to lose sleep over hexbear defederation in particular, but it’s a disconcerting precedent.
I know I can just leave to another instance, but I’ve started !streetwear@lemmy.world here and don’t want to have to move that too 😓
(Apologies if this isn’t the place to share suggestions. Also I do appreciate the hard work the admins are doing. My sincere thanks!!)
I keep wondering how people think like this.
Lemmy is not a democracy. Reddit wasn’t either.
We don’t own shit, we don’t pay for infrastructure, we don’t deal with ddos attacks and database overloads, and reports and all the other shit that comes with running an instance.
What we have is the freedom to move. That’s it. If a given instance wants to experiment with democracy, that’s awesome! But lets be real, committees and large bodies move slow. You will eventually run into something that requires quick action, and it comes back to whoever pays the bills to do it.
In this case, we had an instance preparing to federate, and the announcement post made there was full of people specifically planning to fuck up every other instance. They didn’t hide it, it wasn’t hard to find, it wasn’t coded or otherwise obfuscated.
That is exactly time for a rapid, preemptive decision.
This situation is absolutely nothing like what happened on reddit.
Agreed and that’s what I’m suggesting lemmy.world do. They don’t have to, but it’d be nice if they did, even informally. A simple, “Hey, what do y’all think?” would be nice, before they make a decision that significantly impacts our collective experience.
As for preemptively defederating from trolls, I can appreciate the argument, and if that was the only justification given, I wouldn’t be so concerned. But the admins also cited political opinions that fly in the face of their own branding: a “generic” instance “for the entire world to use”. Had they included “you must love the World Bank and IMF”, I wouldn’t have joined this instance in the first place, just like I didn’t join beehaw. It’s not that I hate those orgs, but I don’t want to be in an echo chamber.
Dude, no one is suggesting we own anything, but having a conversation about how the largest instances operate, when how they operate directly affects so much of Lemmy as a whole, is not uncalled for.
We’re also speaking up because if the admins of an instance are not going to adhere to a code or a standard, best to know now before communities get settled in.