Unsurprisingly given its extremely high profile as a purveyor of transphobic coverage, many mastodon instances have greeted them with a firm block. (If this confuses folks who don't pay attention to this sort of thing, just picture in your head if it was fox news.)

I don't have an issue with the defederation call, and transparency regarding decisions around defederation is very healthy and good!

However, one of the more complicated implications of Lemmy's federated structure is that defederation on instances is more of "everybody's business" than it is on Mastodon, since Lemmy instances host communities and not just users. I don't have much sympathy for free speech absolutists who feel the need to frame all defederation as "censorship" or some of form of tyranny, but since it is potentially splitting the user bases of communities on blahaj that folks on other instances have joined, it makes sense for folks on other instances to want their voices to be heard.

(Obviously, there are constructive and non-constructive ways to do that.)

This is also why the answer to everything won't be "just run your own instance." It's important that more instances have well-developed and transparent moderation standards both internally and externally, and users will need to be savvy about the moderation landscape when they choose what instances to start communities on. (This will be a little less loaded of a question if/when Lemmy gets the ability to migrate communities.)

I think there's a lot of "cross that bridge when we come to it" mindset amongst some of the bigger instance admins that is in the long run is much more detrimental than any one defederation call could be.

Firefox, but make it wet

(I don't know if it's a worse than "calckey" tbf)

We need the Lemmy equivalent of fediblock so we can post this for everyone to defederate

It's going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who's running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.

Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.

I don't know that a formal charter is required, but I do think that it is important that all instance admins do a couple of things:

• Develop and publish a moderation policy in some form
• Determine and publish criteria by which they decide when to defederate from another instance

There isn't one right answer for either of those things, and the point isn't to ensure everybody passes a purity test. It's to set expectations for users on the instance, users on other instances who may participate in communities on the instance, and other instance admins.

Well-thought-out policies will be copied and forked by other new instances, and that will create consensus communities of instances that are at least on the same page when it comes to how a site is supposed to work.

It will also be helpful for the community to be able to talk about things like what instances have a lot of bad actors or poor moderation, something similar to #fediblock on Mastodon. The issues that mods face and that individuals targeted for harassment face are often invisible to the average joe user, and can also be invisible to admins if they aren't actively encountering reports themselves. #fediblock creates a place -- sometimes fractious, yes -- where folks can ensure that those issues are visible and give admins an opportunity to determine whether or not they need to take action.

Poor moderation like not moderating hate speech or punishing users for wanting accessibility?

Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.

If they get into the lemmy space, the risk is that we'll wind up with a bunch of big / important communities hosted on their servers, making it harder down the road to defederate from them. Would be easy for it to snowball into the embrace, extend, exterminate paradigm, in a way much easier than on Mastodon, where nobody can control a hashtag.

So, the issue with Mastodon is that there's no global search and discovery. In order to be found, things have to be hashtagged. The problem with hashtagging is that twitter clout weirdos made hashtagging SO uncool that nobody, anywhere, wants to do it anymore. So, do search hashtags related to your interests and follow folks that are posting to them, but that may not get you too many hits.

If you're on an instance that isn't enormous, try the local timeline to identify some folks to follow. On big instances, that's not usually useful because it's too big a firehose.

For art specifically maybe see the stuff that curator on mastodon.art boosts: https://mastodon.art/@Curator

This is why Lemmy/Kbin is potentially cooler for some applications than Mastodon. Since communities are (a) not stigmitized like tags and (b) also mandatory, plus search exists, it's much easier to find things! (Although there's not yet much to be found)

What if most people end up here, does that defeat the purpose? Is this inevitable?

It is likely that most users will end up on a few big instances. That's not inherently bad, but it can be an issue if those instances have poor moderation.

You'll be able to see content from any instance that isn't defederated from your instance. The main thing this means right now is that you can't see new stuff posted to beehaw. Beehaw defederated lemmy.world and shitjustworks because of high moderation load due to open signups on those instances leading to a lot of troll users coming from them. They may refederate later when moderation tools for the platform improve or if those instances get more of a handle on the trolls, or they may not.

Since there are some big established communities on beehaw, you might benefit from having an account on an instance that is not defederated from them. Or you might not, if those specific communities don't interest you.

You need a critical mass of users, so a quiet instance with few posts is not attractive. If I search for Xbox, there are lots of empty places or places with 3 posts. If there’s one big one (often ends up being in lemmy.world) that’s where I’m subscribing.

How are you using Lemmy, are you participating in a bunch of instances or just one?

A quiet instance is fine (great, even), as long as it's federated with the busier instances that have the content you want to see. The best place on the fediverse is

• An instance with moderation/rules that you feel comfortable with
• Which is federated with all the instances that have communities you want to see

In terms of which communities I join, most communities aren't that active yet, so I'm joining all the ones that look remotely interesting. If the volume gets to be too much as the userbase grows, I'll drop the ones that aren't as fun/interesting.

One thing to note is that when you search from within your instance, the "subscriber" account for communities on other instances doesn't necessarily reflect the total population of subscribers, you'd need to click through to that instance to see the real number I think.

Also, since the total userbase is small relative to reddit, folks are going to be pooling more in general communities rather than specific ones. So for example, you might actually find more xbox related content in the general "gaming" community at Beehaw (20k subscribers) or the one at lemmy.ml (11k subscribers).

Audio gear with non-replaceable batteries bothers me so much