You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than "decentralizing" everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.
And then admins from other instances can decide they don't want to federate with my instance, see how it doesn't solve anything?
Yeah, that's exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!
If everything is "decentralized", you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else's relay.
Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.
Getting rid of bad actors is the job of the users (from their feed) and the mods (from the communities they moderate), no one should have the authority the admins have.
Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.
No, but you can delete the illegal content from your server and other server owners can do the same on their side.
The way it works currently is no different for that, the person who controls the server can block IPs if they want.
What I'm saying is that if some servers are ready to host your content then it's the users' and moderators' decision to block it on their side.
As a matter of governance, I agree with you: my instance is only blocking one instance and that's because they got reported for hosting CSAM. As an admin, I believe that my users are mature enough and smart enough to know how to filter out what they want to see.
But if you acknowledge that server admins can censor content on their servers, your complaint is only about the way that this is done, not the principle, and you agree that there needs to be an established hierarchy.
They can block content on their server, but as long as one server hosts the content, it would be available to anyone who wants to see it, which isn't how things work on Lemmy unless you want to sign up to a bunch of instances to make sure you have access to everything.
If you just want to see the content, you don't need an account. You can just pull the data, like opening up a different website.
What you want is the ability for some other server to push content to a server that the admin might have chosen to say "no, I do not want to have data from them, and I do not want to have my resources used by these users".
If you follow that logic, people should never be able to block or ban you? That makes no sense. Of course anyone should be allowed to block anyone else for whatever reason they choose. That's what defederation is as well. If you don't have the option of blocking or banning, stuff degenerates really badly and really quickly.
No, by my logic only users should be able to decide to ban me entirely and only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities, admins shouldn't exist at all, that's real decentralization, Lemmy is an half-measure.
only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities
As I stated elsewhere, I don't really see how you can even have mods without admins.
But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn't it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?
An instance ban or defederation is a high level decision that has an impact on thousands of users at once, in a single click the admin can decide that tens of thousands of people don't connect with each others anymore or that a single person doesn't have access to hundreds of thousands of communities.
Moderators on the other hand have control over a single community, the amount of damage they can do is minimal.
Indeed - that is why you should consider at least a little bit which admin you want to sign up with (i.e. which instance you choose). Choose an admin that wouldn't just do that willy-nilly (except maybe in cases where abuse/bad actors is obvious), but would only do it after careful consideration and maybe even with involvement from their users.
This is not an argument against the fediverse model of admins owning instances. It's just an argument for choosing good admins.
You can choose the best admin in the world, the admin from another instance has the power to make it so you can't see what's on their server just because they don't like how your admin manages their part of the fediverse.
Again, then choose an admin or an instance that doesn't get defederated a lot. And as said elsewhere, you (or at least most people) don't want a scenario where you can't block other people or whole instances. Defederation is an important moderation tool.
What I'm suggesting wouldn't prevent people from blocking other users or communities, just like on Reddit, instances wouldn't exist at all, which would solve the main issue with Lemmy.
Reddit does have an instance, in that sense. There's just only one. Reddit has admins too. They can even ban entire communities and you can't go to another instance to make the community again.
Also again if there are no instances I'm really at a loss for where these communities are hosted and who is legally responsible, for instance, to remove illegal content.
Backend: The hosting is a database, people provide servers, host content, filter what they don't want on their own servers but if it's hosted by someone else on another server then it's available to users. In the end it works the same way as hosting any website except that you're not dealing with AWS or another such service, it's just people like you and me providing space on their servers to host chunks of the database and you back up everything so no one can wipe their server and make part of the database disappear
Frontend: The database is 100% public, if you create a website to access it all you're doing is providing the UI for users to see what's in the database and interact with it, you don't host the content itself
If you've ever played with crypto the principle is similar, the ledger is public, anyone can create a website to let people see the transactions on it and to push transactions to it
It sounds like nostr. Why don't you just use that?
That said, it's not realistic to have everything be public. But whatever, I'm not going to argue this any more.
"real" decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.
Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.
You are always free to run your own instance, and this is absolutely no different than "decentralizing" everything. The federation model where all users distrust each other degenerates into a fully p2p network.
And then admins from other instances can decide they don't want to federate with my instance, see how it doesn't solve anything?
Yeah, that's exactly the point! How do you think that a decentralized system is any different?!
If everything is "decentralized", you still must have a way to get rid of bad actors. Even nostr is set up in a way that you can not force your node into anyone else's relay.
Forgive my bluntness, but the more you try to argue you point the more it seems you have no clue what you are talking about. There are plenty of things to criticize about Lemmy and ActivityPub in general, but you are missing the mark on all of them.
Getting rid of bad actors is the job of the users (from their feed) and the mods (from the communities they moderate), no one should have the authority the admins have.
Admins still need to have control over what goes into the servers. If you are running a server and someone pushes content that is illegal in your jurisdiction, you can not go around asking users to please stop it for you.
No, but you can delete the illegal content from your server and other server owners can do the same on their side.
The way it works currently is no different for that, the person who controls the server can block IPs if they want.
What I'm saying is that if some servers are ready to host your content then it's the users' and moderators' decision to block it on their side.
As a matter of governance, I agree with you: my instance is only blocking one instance and that's because they got reported for hosting CSAM. As an admin, I believe that my users are mature enough and smart enough to know how to filter out what they want to see.
But if you acknowledge that server admins can censor content on their servers, your complaint is only about the way that this is done, not the principle, and you agree that there needs to be an established hierarchy.
They can block content on their server, but as long as one server hosts the content, it would be available to anyone who wants to see it, which isn't how things work on Lemmy unless you want to sign up to a bunch of instances to make sure you have access to everything.
If you just want to see the content, you don't need an account. You can just pull the data, like opening up a different website.
What you want is the ability for some other server to push content to a server that the admin might have chosen to say "no, I do not want to have data from them, and I do not want to have my resources used by these users".
If you follow that logic, people should never be able to block or ban you? That makes no sense. Of course anyone should be allowed to block anyone else for whatever reason they choose. That's what defederation is as well. If you don't have the option of blocking or banning, stuff degenerates really badly and really quickly.
No, by my logic only users should be able to decide to ban me entirely and only mods should be able to ban me from specific communities, admins shouldn't exist at all, that's real decentralization, Lemmy is an half-measure.
As I stated elsewhere, I don't really see how you can even have mods without admins.
But how is admins banning you from an instance any different than a mod banning you from a community? Why are you okay being banned from a community by a mod but not okay being banned by an admin from an instance? Isn't it the same conceptually speaking, just on a different moderation/administration level?
An instance ban or defederation is a high level decision that has an impact on thousands of users at once, in a single click the admin can decide that tens of thousands of people don't connect with each others anymore or that a single person doesn't have access to hundreds of thousands of communities.
Moderators on the other hand have control over a single community, the amount of damage they can do is minimal.
Indeed - that is why you should consider at least a little bit which admin you want to sign up with (i.e. which instance you choose). Choose an admin that wouldn't just do that willy-nilly (except maybe in cases where abuse/bad actors is obvious), but would only do it after careful consideration and maybe even with involvement from their users.
This is not an argument against the fediverse model of admins owning instances. It's just an argument for choosing good admins.
You can choose the best admin in the world, the admin from another instance has the power to make it so you can't see what's on their server just because they don't like how your admin manages their part of the fediverse.
Again, then choose an admin or an instance that doesn't get defederated a lot. And as said elsewhere, you (or at least most people) don't want a scenario where you can't block other people or whole instances. Defederation is an important moderation tool.
What I'm suggesting wouldn't prevent people from blocking other users or communities, just like on Reddit, instances wouldn't exist at all, which would solve the main issue with Lemmy.
Reddit does have an instance, in that sense. There's just only one. Reddit has admins too. They can even ban entire communities and you can't go to another instance to make the community again.
Also again if there are no instances I'm really at a loss for where these communities are hosted and who is legally responsible, for instance, to remove illegal content.
Backend: The hosting is a database, people provide servers, host content, filter what they don't want on their own servers but if it's hosted by someone else on another server then it's available to users. In the end it works the same way as hosting any website except that you're not dealing with AWS or another such service, it's just people like you and me providing space on their servers to host chunks of the database and you back up everything so no one can wipe their server and make part of the database disappear
Frontend: The database is 100% public, if you create a website to access it all you're doing is providing the UI for users to see what's in the database and interact with it, you don't host the content itself
If you've ever played with crypto the principle is similar, the ledger is public, anyone can create a website to let people see the transactions on it and to push transactions to it
It sounds like nostr. Why don't you just use that?
That said, it's not realistic to have everything be public. But whatever, I'm not going to argue this any more.
"real" decentralization was never the goal of Lemmy or any project in the Fediverse.
Again, it seems like you are either stating the obvious or complaining that the people designing the applications have made different trade-offs that you would like.
There you go, a fully p2p reddit alternative. Now go away and be useful instead of complaining for the sake of complaining.