Why would someone who doesn’t like blocking and de-federation like “federated platforms”?
Yeah part of the point of this is that it’s not a free speech zone unless you want a free speech instance. I prefer a more curated against bigots experience. Others don’t. Still others prefer other forms of curation. Federation means we can all talk to each other as long as we stay within boundaries of what others will stay federated with.
Exactly, it also means we can have different regions for different types of conversations, much like in the real world.
Of course this is an ML post
Lemmy.ml is federated with the vast majority of major instances, what are you trying to say?
It’s like yall forgot the entire post/punchline lmao guess folks really do require /s
Still doesn’t make sense, Lemmy.ml doesn’t constantly threaten to defederate from other instances over political reasons
It’s just me making a dumb diss you’re overthinking it
At least you acknowledge it’s dumb
Yes that was the intent
Yeah but not by a user from ml
It was a play on the joke/post
Might be good to add an
/s
, considering how common that is on the anti-communist servers.Except it wasn’t sarcastic
yunno, on second thought, maybe i don’t want to be using a social platform where communism is expressly the default stance
It isn’t, but don’t let that stop you from leaving.
we could defederate i guess
I’ve never heard of pawb.social
It’s an instance for furries.
:(
Nothing wrong with furries, or furries creating their own instance.
If you love Capitalism and Liberalism I know just the platform for you: Reddit.com
Man that seems to be way more active than this one
The structure of Lemmy itself is built on Communist principles, you’re going to have Communists even if you try to block Communist instances.
“I must preserve my echo chamber!”
HOW DARE YOU HAVE A MODERATELY DISSENTING VOICE, YOU LITERAL NAZI?!?!
I’ll take this comment more seriously when literal nazis stop demanding we listen to them.
Oh literal Nazis can get fucked. My point is that you can disagree on topics and that health discourse is good
Sounds like you’re tilting at windmills in that previous comment tbh
It’s ironically more about certain instances creating echo chambers through constant censorship.
Imagine an instance full of Nazi’s that only ever let’s Nazi posts stick. Is this if any value, or would defederating improve the quality of your experience?
You’re talking about Exploding Heads, which has been defederated by pretty much everybody.
I’d like to come to your house and take a shit in your bed.
Hope you get the help you need 🙏
There’s moderation and there’s making it into an echo chamber. Seems like a difference many don’t understand.
seems like nitpicking to me.
I don’t know if you’re joking or proving my point
I find most people who complain about echo chambers are just mad that they aren’t allowed to barge in everyone’s door and start shouting their bigoted opinions like it’s some moral imperative we all give equal time to all opinions/ideologies.
Are positive, liberal LGBT communities echo chambers? Are they not allowed a collective space to hang out without having to explain themselves all the time?
It depends. Defederation for good reasons is good, defederation for bad or false reasons is generally bad.
As an example, having a strict and democratic defederation/federation policy has contributed to Hexbear having the most active trans community on Lemmy, and it’s a good thing that there’s an actively protected trans space free from bigotry.
At the same time, defederating from instances for political reasons under the guise of other reasons is generally a bad thing.
It’s largely context dependent.
I mean, “bad” in this case is completely subjective. There are large trans communities on other instances (blahaj being the most obvious one) and they have their reasons for defederating from Hexbear.
Hexbear defederated from blahaj, not the other way around. Either way, Hexbear remains the most active trans community on Lemmy.
I understand why anticommunist instances like Lemmy.world defederate from Hexbear, I just don’t think it will help Lemmy.world in the long run, as Lemmy itself by nature is going to attract Communists due to its structure.
I dunno, I feel like anyone drawn to Lemmy for that reason will find lemmy.ml nearly as easily. If world suffers because of bad practices, well, that’s the way it goes. At least the fediverse lives on.
They will, yes, but not always. Apps like Voyager assume .world as the default, causing friction when leftists join and run into silencing of their views.
Lemmy.ml is interesting, it’s a reference to Marxism-Leninism, but it doesn’t require users to be Communists like Lemmygrad, or leftists in general like Hexbear, hence the active population on Hexbear.
- ∞🏳️⚧️Edie [it/its, she/her, fae/faer, love/loves, ze/hir, des/pair, null/void, none/use name, kitty]@lemmy.ml0·17 days ago
Lemmy.ml is interesting, it’s a reference to Marxism-Leninism
Is it really? Others have said it isn’t, that it’s just because .ml domains were free.
Honestly .world should have just blocked the most common shiposting Hexbear comms like chapotraphouse and dunk_tank as these are what most users found annoying. And I believe ther are more leftists on .world than one might think. There’s a great games comm on Hexbear too, and downvote away on the leftist game posts - Hexbear doesn’t have downvotes anyway!
The problem is that Lemmy.world doesn’t want Communists using their communities, not that their users shouldn’t be exposed to Communist posts, because they wanted homogenous liberalism.
There are some leftists on .world, but they usually leave in favor of leftist instances from what I have personally seen.
Absolutely agree about Hexbear’s games comm, easily the best gaming comm on Lemmy.
There are some leftists on .world, but they usually leave in favor of leftist instances from what I have personally seen.
Fair, that’s what I did.
Ada is okay with others chasing off people from the instance. Hard to say it’s a pro trans one after seeing multiple witch hunts done against a particular comm by one user and Ada just supporting the witch hunt
Yes. Doing something bad for a bad reason is bad, doing a good thing for a good reason is good.
After that, things get more complicated.
Are positive, liberal LGBT communities echo chambers
Could be, especially if there aren’t a multitude of sentiments there. That doesn’t mean all sentiments must be present of course.
Are they not allowed a collective space to hang out without having to explain themselves all the time
I don’t think anyone said they aren’t allowed to have such a space.
You’re in an echo chamber if you curate your home feed to only show one opinion and then never change it; it doesn’t matter what the opinion is
That’s a flagrant strawman
How?
I’m not sure you understand a what a strawman is. This doesn’t relate to it.
No one is advocating for what the prior comment illustrated. It’s a caricature, a way people describe how others interact online while implying they themselves keep more diversity of opinion around them.
Most have varying degrees of interactions with people across the ideological spectrum in different spaces in their lives. The image that was drawn is so simplistic and doesn’t represent most people.
Just throwing up a screenshot of “echo chamber“ isn’t a meaningful response. If anything it’s patronizing and low effort. It says more about your grasp of this subject than it does about my argument.
This is where you implied it was an attack. By saying that I was drawing an image of people when literally all I did was an explain what an echo chamber was. I never passed judgement on you, or said anything about the diversity of opinions I partake in. You decided all by yourself to be upset about a simple explanation of what an echo chamber was. If you’re not in one, don’t worry about it lol
You lectured me on what echo chambers are for no reason then. Is that how I should be interpreting this?
Did I ask for a definition? Did anyone?
How did you take this as an attack? An echo chamber is the exaggerated idea of hearing only a single opinion, as curated to your own beliefs. It doesn’t matter what the belief is.
Obviously no one is 100% in an echo chamber, but it’s also obvious that everyone is guilty of confirmation bias; and tend to prefer seeing their own opinions online. I never said anything about my own feed or accused you of being in an echo chamber. I just explained what one was because you implied that it’s impossible to be in a liberal echo chamber
I didn’t say it was an attack. I said it was a strawman. Just stop responding to things I didn’t say/putting words in my mouth.
Steve are you alright? You’re so defensive against someone who’s just explaining a concept you literally asked about
They didn’t give a meaningful response to my pretty clearly rhetorical question… Are you sure you’re OK? Are you just gonna be a patronizing ass? Can you please stop wasting my time playing dumb?
When did I say anything about attacking? Still waiting for you to show me.
Well that’s definitely your own experience on federated platforms, but I wasn’t speaking to that circumstance. I made a mastodon account and criticized our government’s massive funding of Israel in spite of our lack of critical infrastructure and healthcare and got spammed with “Israel has a right to defend itself, and you 're a trumper if you think otherwise” type comments by people that post one response and then immediately block you. Which is laughable and couldn’t be further from the truth. That is the perpetual echo chamber I was referring to from my personal experience.
Ok
🥱
I think it depends on what you disagree with. If one is promoting going after our neighbors, hunting them down and killing them? Yeah, defederate. If another is Meta trying to take over the federation. Yeah, I vote defederate. If one thinks Hawaiian pizza is a travesty and the other doesn’t, hold your horses.
womp womp
I tried like 4 different lemmy instances before settling on lemm.ee because it hasn’t defederated from the socialists or “tankies”. So I can participate.
This defederation fracturing lemmy really speaks to both self-censorship of allowable ideologies and also bad quality of admins and mods several servers.
If lemmy can’t somehow federate communities separately from instances I don’t see lemmy thriving.
Meh, that’s kind of the point, no? Seems like it would be more jarring to only federate at the community level, as you either a) still have to interact with people from the unwanted instance or b) deal with randomly hidden comments from that instance. If the community dies because it’s on an unpopular instance, well, that’s the way it goes. Can always start up/join a community on another instance that’s federated with yours.
Lemmy is thriving enough. Self-sufficient instances like Hexbear are fine without large amounts of federation. I do see Lemmy.world running into issues in the future due to their strong Zionist slant and anti-Leftist stance, but the other major instances seem to be fine.
I do see Lemmy.world running into issues in the future
I think lemmy.world is already pretty bad. To get away from their posts and comments I’ve considered joining hexbear, since you people honestly have the best content and most wholesome community and aren’t federated with .world, but I also don’t want to be completely isolated from the rest of the fediverse. However, I just noticed there are only 5 instances in hexbear’s blocked instance list and plenty in the linked list. Maybe I didn’t notice how all other instances started federating with hexbear again?
To get away from their posts and comments I’ve considered joining hexbear, since you people honestly have the best content and most wholesome community and aren’t federated with .world
Make an account, Hexbear is perfect for you. I made a Hexbear account a few months ago and enjoy my time there much more than I do here, there’s far fewer struggle sessions and the quality of discussion is much higher.
I also don’t want to be completely isolated from the rest of the fediverse.
The cool thing about Hexbear is that it has by far the most active userbase I have seen, it’s fully self-sufficient and you won’t likely miss the rest.
However, I just noticed there are only 5 instances in hexbear’s blocked instance list and plenty in the linked list. Maybe I didn’t notice how all other instances started federating with hexbear again?
Some instances have Hexbear blocked on their side that Hexbear doesn’t have blocked, so this can be misleading, however it’s mostly the right-wing instances like shitjustworks, lemmy.world, and lemmy.ca that are of note, and their content fine to drop.
Hexbear the most wholesome community? I need to wash my eyes after reading that.
Although I’m curious, what itch does it itch for you?
Have you visited Hexbear? It’s a very wholesome instance overall and posters are very supportive, assuming you’re a Leftist. What leads you to believe otherwise?
Lol when I got banned from a major comm for defending a trotskyist comrade, after two years of participation on the instance, I learned all about the wholesomeness of your “non-sectarian” instance.
I think a prime example of hexbear wholesomeness is their trans megathreads: https://hexbear.net/post/3363552
They even have a community to help each other out: !mutual_aid@hexbear.net
I’m genuinely
unsurprised my previous comment got removed but anyway at least thanks for answering and providing an example.Anticommunism is generally removed on Lemmy.ml, probably the reason.
yes it is known that not being wholsome = not being communist.
Yeah it is thriving, what I meant is that to have a chance to replace reddit, lemmy needs to find some technical solutions (moving / migrating / merging of communities) and somehow stop fracturing into islands.
But maybe that age of the internet has passed and people are no longer willing because of trolls, bad faith actors, sock puppets, bots… and the increasing polarization of ideology and propaganda.
My point is that it doesn’t need to surpass Reddit, as long as its users enjoy using it then that is enough. Using Hexbear as an example, Hexbear doesn’t need any more growth, and is active enough to pretty much fulfill anything it needs on its own local instance.
I don’t think surpassing or having anything to do with reddit is valuable. I use lemmy because I think reddit sucks but now I can see how it can be better. For example, I want to disable all voting on my instance, I don’t believe it helps anything and the only reason lemmy has it is because of reddit, there is no algorithm or anything. That to me seems like the worst reason to have something.
Ok I’m just thinking out loud here…
Part of what makes (made) reddit great is that there are so many niche communities. That you scroll through reddit and find something interesting and new and can just jump in and discuss it.
THAT I think we can all agree would be great to grow in lemmy.There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.
And yeah for certain subs like vegan you don’t need downvotes since there wouldn’t be too many “controversial” topics. I suspect part of what is lacking on reddit is that there isn’t enough “tagging” on reddit. Like having ways for users to mark a post “funny/silly” or “unconstructive” or “misinformation” or NSFW, NSFL or hatespeech. Besides upvoting. Maybe I’m wrong with this.
But I think over time reddit degraded because the system didn’t support protection against malicious actors. For example tons of meta jokes. Every serious topic has a joke comment on top. You can’t filter them out. That might be a great use of AI like chatGPT for this where the AI learns from the tags and then allows to filter out joke comments. Not censor but allows you to filter out things that can be fun and crass but are not good for long term community. Basically to help moderators.
Of course the current problem is that users themselves have become more and more “post-truth”, not just the fascists but the “leftists”, liberals and centrists too and shout down any dissident opinion because they assume it’s bad faith. Nobody wants to engage any more because they’ve been burned. Maybe that can be reversed if lemmy has the right tools and the community is moderated well enough to “heal”. But again, the admins and moderators are currently the problem on lemmy. Lots of power-tripping and radicalism (and I don’t just mean the socialists lol).
And voting with your feet is also a problem because it leads to fracturing like mentioned in OP and that does have a negative effect. Like the europe@feddit.de community lost 75% of it’s users with the move to feddit.org. I assume similar things will happen to the vegan community now that you moved and people searching for vegan will be confused. Better technical tools are required.
So I think it’s not just about surpassing reddit in numbers, even though at least some growth is very curcial for niches to thrive, but to grow the usability of the software.
Anyway, just rambling / thinking out loud 🙂
Just to tone set, I appreciate the rambling and thinking out loud, I’m kind of doing the same and if I don’t write this intro people might think im mad or am dwelling but really I just want this to be better
for the record, Vegan Theory Club and Vegan Home Cooks moved off of lemmy.world ahead of this by several months because I don’t agree with their philosophy or motivation. Mods and users of my instance were involved but me (tech admin) and Arcane Potato (admin) were not involved at all and to be honest I only sort of know what happened, I’m cooking food and posting about my gardening. To address your last thought first I do not care about fracturing anything, I don’t view my instance as a “lemmy” instance, it is its own website with its own content and the rest doesn’t matter. I’m trying to grow my local communities with local users and the federation is a bonus. In my experience online active forms don’t need hundreds of thousands of people to be fun or interesting, Reddit needs that to sell ads.
There is no question that lemmy IS the same social media “mode” as reddit, a link aggregator where users can democratically sort news and articles and topics and discuss things. Lemmy is a clone of reddit, this can’t be disputed. The question is how to make it better than reddit and avoid the pitfalls. Right now moderation and admins are a bit problematic like e.g. the recent vegan clusterfuck.
Reddit has never been democratic and the votes drive a mystery algorithm with karma scores and the votes themselves live behind a wall of fuzzing that Lemmy does not do. There is also hidden moderation which isn’t possible on Lemmy with the modlog. So there is a lot of cogs in making reddit content viable and it isn’t simply what people vote on. My thoughts is that this is probably for the best if they’re going to have them at all, but makes them kayfabe like WWE Wrestling. Direct democracy as what is occurring now on Lemmy sucks and is basically spam that favors bots and propaganda. In my take moderation and admins are not the problem, it is lack of quality users who are willing to contribute which is the signal and too much noise of douche bags with no ownership or respect shitting all over it. If people want a site to doomscroll while depressed on the toilet, I’m for sure not willing to pay for that. They should just use reddit. One really big and key difference is that I personally own the server it runs on and it is open source software with an open license that I am free to modify.
I think this is important to understand if federated media is going to succeed. We need most people, many of whom already pay subscriptions for spotify and hbo, to pay for and deploy instances. There are already managed service providers that host it for you for reasonable rates. I don’t really think instances should have more than a handful of communities (if any) to avoid large centralized hosts like lemmy.world. Each instance is a collection of only the communities subscribed on that instance or created by one of the users and becomes a personal service for that person or small group of people. You’re right about the fracturing and we see that now but I think that can be solved with multi-comm tags pretty easily. I think we should do more to promote specific communities than instances. For Vegan Theory Club, I really only want to promote !homecooks@vegantheoryclub.org and getting that entire thing out there is the goal.
To be honest I think 100 people per maximum per instance is probably a sweet spot where people who decide to pay for it can keep an eye on all the users and the costs for any one person won’t spiral out of control (~12 usd/month for a hosted container service). I think having smaller instances of accountable users to each other is the end goal and it will take a lot of education, software development and changes to move in that way. To your point I think discoverability for communities is problematic now but this is beta and third party services might come up with something eventually.
And their desire to spin off their own version of lemmy in Java
Wait, what? Where can I read more about that?
It’s called “Sublinks,” I believe. They don’t trust the spooky scary commies and want to make their own, worse Lemmy alternative, which is silly.
Idk if it’s really to avoid the dirty commies.
Seriously think it’s just them thinking they either know better or just don’t want to learn rust
They could wait for Lemmy official dev or learn rust, it would take far less time. No, they want control.
Yes, I basically searched for which one is least likely to defederate from random shit.
I’m prepared to traverse seas of horrors to bring home fresh memes every single day (except I sometimes skip alternating Thursdays if I have to wait for too long to say hi to Reginald).
I’m not sure what’s going on in this comment but I like it
yep, this is a lemmy.ml post alright
Have yet to personally block any instances. So far I think the closest I’ve come is blocking a spider community because fuck those hell spawns and a Minecraft community or two.
Edit:
Found out there’s more than I remember being blocked. Multiple mc communities, a cock community (, because that stuff ain’t for me and I remember accidentally clicking on one post from there by accident), a pussy community because I don’t come here for porn, a Sintendo community, some bikinibottomtwitter or something similarly named community (you can guess why), and for some reason an xbox community (couldn’t tell you why).
Also, I noticed for some reason I have someone from a different instance that I cannot remember why I blocked. Some guy from lemmt(dot)tf, so I have absolutely no clue since I have no idea what that instance is like, let alone remember anything about that account.
🥺 not the spiders
As an arachnophobe, I personally made it my mission to block that community without looking so I’d never have to see it again. Can’t stand spiders.
I think there’s benefit to blocking the particularly Nazi/pedo instances, but otherwise do wish we’d just all be able to federate together and share content for the most part.
You’ll just need to find an instance that federates with most instances. I think that’s why I chose lemm.ee. A lot of them censored porn too which was lame.
I defederated lemmy.world because I don’t feel like hosting and re transmitting US propaganda.
It is kinda surprising how much obvious propaganda makes it onto Lemmy, for example those memes that aren’t really memes as much as “haha this opinion wrong”
Lemmy itself is largely made up of Communists, Anarchists, and liberals fleeing Reddit.
The cycle of a specific comm on world
we only allow memes here
points out posts that aren’t memes
stop asking us to follow our rules
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is a very political place, even compared to Reddit where there’s a shitload of politics
this is so true lmao.
mm yes federated media platform, surely i won’t run into shitty people now
runs into shitty people:
Defederation is weak sauce. Just block/tag accounts that aren’t willing to engage in good faith, and your page clears up pretty quickly.
At the end of the day, there aren’t even that many people stirring the pot. They’re just unhealthily active.
let people defederate idgaf