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Is defederation from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works still necessary? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by theangriestbird@beehaw.org to c/support@beehaw.org

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This is more of a question for the admins, but this can certainly be a more open discussion.

Per this thread, beehaw defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works two months ago, around the time that the reddit exodus was happening. Lemmy was blowing up, those instances had an open sign-up policy, and this meant that admins of other instances (like Beehaw) that wanted to heavily moderate their communities became quickly overwhelmed with the number of users from these two instances. Beehaw defederated to make the workload more realistic.

Two months on, I'm wondering if this defederation is still necessary. It seems to me that Lemmy overall has slowed down a lot, and maybe the flow of users from these outside servers would not be as overwhelming as it was before? I respect the decision of the admins one way or the other - I know that the lack of moderation tools was another factor in this decision. I'm just curious if this is something that has been considered recently?

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[-] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 8 points 1 year ago

Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort. Every instance will have some amount of problematic users, or even users you simply don't agree with.

If we'd all defederate from one another because some users on each instance are out of line, the Fediverse would die out quickly.

[-] Lionir@beehaw.org 14 points 1 year ago

I've recently made a blog post about this subject if you'd like to read it : https://lionir.ca/posts/open-limitless-federation/

That said, defederation is a tool like any to build site culture and moderate spaces. If the only thing we can have are awful spaces because we should not curate our own community, we'd be better off not federating at all. Thankfully, most admins understand this and do take actions when necessary.

[-] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The main problem I personally have with defederation is that it can make it very difficult to discover and participate in already niche communities.

Sure, being open to everyone comes with its problems. But a large user base that's able to connect with each other is essential to these niche communities. Let's say I had an interest in Virtual Boy homebrew development. Say someone created a community for this on lemmy.world, I would obviously want to join this one instead of creating my own, because we'd likely already only be a handful of people. Now a lot of instances start defederating from lemmy.world for whatever reason(s) (and sure, there are likely good reasons to do so). This would likely completely kill such a niche community. Sure, you could try and coordinate moving the community to a different instance, but finding an instance that isn't defederated from any of each users' home instances will be hard if defederation becomes so commonplace. Users could also all create an account on that new instance, but most users probably don't want to create dozens of accounts because each of their communities happens to be on a different instance.

I already created accounts on multiple instances because the instance I was using either defededated from communities I wanted to interact with, or other instances with communities I wanted to interact with defederated with my home instance. I don't even care about my accounts as such (content history, upvote count or whatever), and transferring subscribed communities (and saved posts/comments) is done with a simple script within minutes or even seconds, but having to find a new instance every few weeks because instances start defederating from one another can be cumbersome (and again, it will eventually lead to shrunk niche communities).

If I see a user or community that I don't want to interact with, I simply block it and move on.

[-] Antik@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

"a lot of instances start defederating with Lemmy world"?

Besides beehaw, which ones are you talking about?

[-] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That was just part of my theoretical example of what would be my "horror" scenario. I don't know which instances defederate with lemmy.world off the top of my head.

EDIT: To clarify, I don't think the (de)federation situation is terrible in its current state. I'm saying that it can go downhill pretty fast if instances start defederating others because some non-critical amount of users of the other instance have political/world views that don't align with theirs. Of course a line has to be drawn somewhere and I 100% agree with defederation of instances that are for example dedicated to nazis or whatever, I just don't think defederation of general purpose (or broader purpose at least) instances is a good idea, even if these instances are also a home to some questionable people.

My original comment was in reply to the parent comment suggesting that defederation from lemm.ee (which happens to be my home instance, at least for this account which is the one I use the most) should be considered because it is home to fascists. It's not purpose-built for fascists, there may happen to be some fascists on this instance because it's open registration (and I think open registration is a good thing in most cases).

[-] admin@beehaw.org 8 points 1 year ago

Defederation should only ever be used as a last resort.

That depends on the, particular, situation. Using words like 'should', in your estimation here, shows that you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. You haven't carefully thought through all of the possible scenarios.

[-] Zworf@beehaw.org 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I agree, this is kinda hurting the fediverse.

I came here because I happened to see a post on lemmynsfw (coming from lemmy.world through federation) about Threads, and I was looking to reply from beehaw (because replying with a lemmynsfw account gives a certain "flair" of course) so I was looking for that post here. But I couldn't find it anywhere. Then I started looking into the reason here. Then I found this post which explained it.

But I think it's important to realise that this way the fediverse will stay very niche and fragmented. It would be better to let the users have a choice who they want to see. And defederate only in very heavy situations (for example, nobody would expect beehaw to federate with gab.com because they support actual total nazis). But blocking lemmy.world as one of the biggest instances is... strange.

The thing is, I came here as a new user because spez makes reddit so inhospitable with his dick moves. So I went to https://join-lemmy.org/ and found beehaw. (well in fact I went to lemmy.ml first but didn't like the attitude there). But join-lemmy doesn't describe this whole complex fabric of defederation, it appears as if I could see the whole fediverse from beehaw. Because lemmy.world is a really major instance this is a little bit disingenous. For a new user like me (and a very technical one) this is really hard to grasp. And will lead to users being put off.

I think this whole fragmentation thing is a much bigger threat to the fediverse than Threads is to be honest.

I saw the same on Mastodon, with a lot of German sites instantly blocking federation as soon as another instance doesn't copy exactly the same set of rules word for word (so no incidents are even necessary). In my opinion this hurts the fediverse a lot. As a user I don't want to maintain accounts everywhere, the whole point of ActivityPub was not having to do that.

And don't forget that not all communities on lemmy.world might necessarily bad. Reddit itself is full of toxic communities like the old the_donald (now banned of course). But also really good ones. The same is true for lemmy.world. By by defederating we're blocking the chance of even seeing them.