Why lemmy.world should not defederate from beehaw.org.

FantasticFox@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 147 points –

What defederating would mean:

  • We won't see beehaw.org posts/comments on other instances.

Pros:

  • There is less confusion, you can't respond to a beehaw.org user, thinking they will be able to see your response when in reality they cannot.

Cons:

  • We won't be able to see any beehaw.org comments/posts on other instances, so we will miss out on some comment threads and posts. It could be good to be able to see them and interact with the other users there even though beehaw.org users won't see any of our content.

Summary

Overall, I think it is better not to defederate, but simply unsubscribe from all of their communities (and as we no longer get posts from their instance, with time these will cease to appear on our 'front page').

beehaw.org users already can't see our posts/comments anywhere so it's not like defederating would change their experience in any way, so it wouldn't really be retaliation and would just limit the content available to lemmy.world users.

What do you think?

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My gut feeling is that defederation should be done as little as possible. I'm quite new to all this, but to me, it feels like it should be user preference instead of admin/mod preference. I have no clue whether that is even possible though. Perhaps there should be more filters than just Subscribed, Local and All to alleviate certain issues.

One problem atm is that a user can't block by instance, just by community or individual users. It seems a lot of people are requesting this ability though so hopefully it gets added in the future.

I think that would be great feature. Do I understand correctly that if a user would want to do that now that they have to set up their own instance and determine what to federate and what not?

Yes, that would be perfect and could have avoided beehaw's decision.