Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is
Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.
I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.
For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.
This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.
Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?
The thing that I think didn't sit right with a lot of people is that Beehaw's admins apparently said (I haven't seen it first hand) that they see a future in refederating with Beehaw's communities being kept private, only accessible to Beehaw users, while Beehaw users would get access to the wider Fediverse.
To be honest, I feel that it's Beehaw's prerogative to grant or revoke access to anyone on other instances, but also I wouldn't be surprised that in turn other instances would not federate with an instance that would not give access to other instances' users for its communities.
I do, personally, think it's reasonable for an instance to have "private" communities exclusive to their own users. This is likely a subject that comes down to personal belief, but after dealing with so many trolls and bad actors on other platforms, I absolutely do see a need to have those kinds of permissions.
That’s sounds…not possible. At least at the current iteration of the software. It also seems like kinda the opposite of what the fediverse was meant to be.
I just looked at one of my communities and the only main setting is whether mods can post. You can’t set perms at the community level to exclude certain users or make them private
On the latter part of your reply. I agree. It is their prerogative but I do see obvious benefits of not going say…allowlist only federation. We are swiftly hitting a point where there will need to be instances just to manage user registrations and avoid bottlenecks and scaling issues.
Yep, not possible currently, hence defederation for now. The point is that there must be some change, better mod tools, less new users, or something to change the calculus for Beehaw to refederate. The point Beehaw is making that they can't create the community they want with the current software iteration, either with regards to perms or mod tools without defederating from other big instances.
BTW that's my point, it's not what the Fediverse is meant to be, that's why it's weird. Again, this is second hand info, so take it with a grain of salt.
IDK why is everyone making accounts on the 3-4 biggest instances.
How do you expect a newcomer who has no understanding of content federation to find these low-pop instances? Of course everyone's joining the main handful, they don't know anything else exists.
I'd imagine most people coming from typical social media don't even realize that instances are a thing when they sign up on one. They've heard about lemmy or kbin or whatever, so they go to lemmy or kbin or whatever and sign up. Once they learn how it works, they've already established a profile on that instance; they're not going to start over on a new one.
I don't think that's particularly true. Reddit had plenty of people making multiple alter accounts for various purposes, and some of the third-party apps made it easy to swap between accounts. Multiple profiles throughout the fediverse doesn't seem a particular stretch.
Multiple accounts is not the same thing as abandoning your profile and instance to start over somewhere else. I have more than one profile right here on kbin, for example.
Regardless, you’ve ignored the entire rest of my comment, and kinda the whole point; people don’t know. How could they know? Where are they going to learn if not here, and once they are here, why leave?
Makes sense. It was the main reason I just built an instance, for speed and performance reasons, but also to have control on my account. I have the know how so f-it.
And I’m mulling over just opening it if there’s a huge surge come 7/1/23. Though I may stick to application based onboarding to make sure it’s not totally overwhelmed.
This wasn’t the impression I got from the Beehaw admins. I believe they felt that blocking lemmy.world users from Beehaw but still being able to have Beehaw users interact with lemmy.world would have been better than full defederation, but I don’t think that was the ideal solution either. Something like an approval process for an external user to interact with Beehaw communities would be preferable.
Also, Beehaw could go fully private today if they wanted to, that definitely doesn’t seem to be their intention.