Following the announcement by beehaw admins to defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, there has been many posts and messages regarding that decisions and what other instances will do.

I personally believe Lemmy/kbin can only thrive if there is a free flow of content between different instances, with instance admins taking a back seat and focusing more on the infrastructure and making sure the technical bugs are smoothened out. Community mods can moderate their communities, and users can block the communities they don’t find appealing (there’s even a toggle in settings to hide every NSFW post from your feed altogether).

We don’t want to create walled gardens, nor do we want to make Lemmy more confusing than it already is for new users. We will not be defederating from any instance if there is even one good community on it that our instance users might find useful. So far we have only blocked lemmygrad.ml, and right now we have no plans to block anyone else.

  • Joker@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    13·
    1 year ago

    I will say that I sometimes like to visit controversial communities due to curiosity, and to be amazed at all the insane and braindead things people say. Furthermore, I don’t like living in a bubble, and knowing what people I disagree with say/think is important to forming well-informed opinions. So sometimes I do like to subscribe to communities on even places like lemmygrad just for those reasons. It’s annoying when instances block controversial instances, because controversy often interesting and very lurkable. I understand why those places are blocked, and I definitely don’t want to see fascist bs on my feed all the time. But I wish I could have the best of both worlds.

    I wanna decide what I get to see. It would be cool if the instances could be blocked on a followers-only basis. Like, blocked for the all feeds, blocked in general. But not for me if I follow it.

    I actually chose this instance in large part because it only blocks one other one lol

    • tehmics@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      5·
      1 year ago

      I’ll echo this sentiment. I also lurk communities that I don’t agree with, and I want to see dissenting views. I find that heavy moderation often just leads to echo chambers where real issues can be kicked under the rug

    • Tb0n3@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      4·
      1 year ago

      Are we not capable of hiding things we don’t want to see on Lemmy ourselves? Why would I want to be babysat by anyone when I can make adult choices on what I want to see my own damn self? Censorship was what ruined Reddit years ago. Leave it entirely up to the users.

  • Rottcodd@lemmy.one
    11·
    1 year ago

    I just want to be able to control what I see. I have no desire to control what other people see and I sure as fuck don’t want other people to control what I see.

    That’s it. That’s my entire position on the matter.

  • knife@lemmy.world
    6·
    1 year ago

    thank you for not being a drama queen and railroading this whole thing by leveraging the small amount of power you have to make some bullshit point about your social views.

    • MisterFrog@aussie.zone
      113·
      1 year ago

      I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re a second language speaker where “user” is a masculine noun, but other genders exist lol. I encourage you to use “themselves” instead.

      • TheWoozy@lemmy.fmhy.ml
        7·
        1 year ago

        Akchually, since we’re being annoyingly corrective, shouldn’t it be “themself”?

        OR is it able-ist to assume the commentor does not express multiple personalities?

        • MisterFrog@aussie.zone
          21·
          1 year ago

          Yeah I guess I reordered it “Just let the user decide themselves…” in my head.

          As I guessed the commenter was a German speaker. This is a very common occurrence and not something malicious (check like every boardgame from Germany referring to “the player” as “he”), just lost in translation.

          Never meant to be annoying or holier-than-thou, people can genuinely misunderstand that it’s some sexist remark, and so I pointed it out. Just said it so the commenter hopefully isn’t misunderstood in the future.

          So, if you feel that’s some woke-ass snowflake nonsense, be my guest lol

          • Tb0n3@lemmy.fmhy.ml
            3·
            1 year ago

            On the internet whoever you’re conversing with is male unless explicitly stated. It really really does not matter since it’s all just randos on the internet anyway. Please note the large number of down votes you got for actually caring.

            • MisterFrog@aussie.zone
              21·
              1 year ago

              On the internet whoever you’re conversing with is male unless explicitly stated

              “OH mY gOd, aRE yoU a GiRL???” In a game lobby.

              Same vibes.

              Just reiterating, that the original poster was German as I suspected, and pointing it out might spare them being misunderstood in the future. I have no regrets.

  • dart@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    6·
    1 year ago

    Just throwing my opinion in… Since we can block communities on our own, we don’t really need someone to decide which to block for us. I mean, it’s not my instance, so you can do whatever you want, and I actually might’ve decided to block lemmygrad.ml myself, but I’d still rather see the posts and make that determination myself.

    • amcjv12@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 year ago

      Completely agree with this. I can block anything I don’t want to see, and I’d rather not have someone else decide that for me

      • MisterFrog@aussie.zone
        1·
        1 year ago

        Can you blanket block comments from other instances users?

        I am not a fan of Beehaw’s decision, but I can’t a setting where you can actually do this.

    • areyouevenreal@lemmy.fmhy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      I think the issue here people posting things in BeeHaw’s communities that they don’t want. The only way to stop that is to block users on a case by case basis, and since people can create unlimited free accounts this is ineffective given the low numbers of mods they have. The only way to work around this was to ban the two instances that had the most bad actors and easy registration.

      I have floated the idea of a whitelist of users for their communities, but have been informed this isn’t supported by Lemmy at the moment.

  • calvinklein97@lemmy.fmhy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thanks for that. I tried to subscribe to some German communities on Feddit just to find out that they blocked our instance on their end. Fuck them I guess, I’m staying here.

    • FrankTheHealer@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      Very tanky ultra left pro Russia, pro China, anti everyone else part of Fediverse.

      Check them out if you like but they only talk shit about the West and NATO. Put another way, you are not missing much by avoiding them.

  • Phil Harrison@feddit.uk
    1·
    1 year ago

    The problem at the moment is that the community moderation tools are pretty limited. At some point there will be coordinated attacks on some communities and the moderation tools are not yet sufficient to defend against that sort of thing.

  • HonorableScythe@kbin.social
    1·
    1 year ago

    I sort of agree, but I also know that as Lemmy becomes more popular, defederating will become necessary as trolls and hate groups open instances. It’s a problem on Mastodon. A trans friend there posted about her experience bra shopping and a bunch of transphobes from other Mastodon servers came in to attack her, including an admin of one server who called her a slur and told her to stop reporting because they’d never remove anything hateful towards trans people.

    On a centralized service like Reddit, hate subs can just be quarantined by the admins or removed wholesale. With a decentralized service, every instance will need to defederate those groups to keep them out. There’s no way to bar them from making a new server.

    • dreadgoat@kbin.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      It’s important to choose your home wisely.

      I have an account here on kbin.social, but I also wanted a dedicated lemmy account. I chose fmhy because it aligns with what I want: hearing every voice, for better or for worse. I considered beehaw due to their large gaming community, but I read about their philosophy and saw that they were trying to create more of a safe space for their users (suspicion recently confirmed). If someone wants a more positive experience without having to worry about trolling and harassment, beehaw would be the better choice. I am personally fine with treading through sludge to find hidden gems, so I made my own choice.

      Bear in mind that defederation isn’t bidirectional. If beehaw decides to defederate fmhy, I don’t care, I can still see gaming@beehaw and interact with users that live on instances still federated with my own. But the beehaw users are safe from from troll-friendly hosts, so everybody wins. This isn’t true, as pointed out by zinklog. It can still be worked around by having accounts in multiple places, but even with the eventual account migration feature, this makes it impossible for anyone to see everything in any one place. Maybe this can be fixed in the future, as the fediverse continues to develop?

      To directly map it to the example of your friend, if she chose to live on an instance more like beehaw, she would still be able to interact with the federated community at large, but be better shielded. If someone tried to throw slurs at her from an instance with a lower standard, she wouldn’t see it at all, and the person delivering the slurs likely wouldn’t even realize it.

  • adderaline@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    I think that structures that permit people and communities to do literally whatever they want is how lemmy can thrive. The people in beehaw (myself included) are on the whole perfectly chill with the defederation, and the specific reasons and conditions for that defederation. The admins have been open about the fact that they want more moderation tools for our community before refederating with those instances, it isn’t a permanent state of affairs. I like beehaw. Its chill. Maybe other people wouldn’t like that, but then maybe just don’t host your account there? There are tons of other places to be. This isn’t reddit, if you aren’t inside beehaw, its management doesn’t affect you.

    Except for the fact that defederating is bidirectional at the moment. It would be nice if the platform’s defederation and the user’s defederation were less tied together, but as far as I can tell, the beehaw admins only defederated because there wasn’t a compromise between “do nothing” and “ban everything” available to them.