Top 200 Defederated instances from the Fediverse (May 2024)

WebWizard@links.hackliberty.org to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 299 points –
203

Some of those instance names are, uh, interesting.

I’m genuinely disappointed that Asbestos Cafe is basically forbidden now. That’d be a solid name for a hardcore alcoholic vegan bar.

THREADS IS 39 πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰πŸŽ‰πŸ₯³πŸ₯³πŸ₯³πŸ₯³πŸ₯³πŸ₯³πŸ“ŸπŸ“ŸπŸ“ŸπŸ“ŸπŸ“ŸπŸ“ŸπŸ“ŸπŸ“ŸπŸ“Ÿ

Needs to be much higher...

Should be first

Why? It's just fearmongering and would damage the fediverse

XMPP

The difference is nobody used XMPP before and after Google integrated it. People are using the fediverse. I don't think people already using the fediverse will ever migrate to threads. If anything, people may realise that they can talk to threads people and leave Meta's system. Even the BBC and the European Union have their own instances. I cannot see them migrating to Threads whenever Meta messing with politics is a known issue

Has Threads already implemented activityPub or is it work in progress?

WIP. You can see threads posts from other instances but threads cannot see other instances IIRC

so it's only one way federation. hm

3 more...
3 more...

I disagree.

We know what META is about and what they do. We came here because we didn't want to be treated as products and used as experiments constantly watched by "AI algorithm".

The smartest thing anybody ever said to me is, "don't let a pimp have access to the battered woman's shelter."

Almost all of us are here because we have either always thought that, or grew to think that.

Taking down a threat to free and open fediverse is the opposite of damage to fediverse.

3 more...
3 more...
3 more...

THREADS

Threads is actually #7 on this ranking: https://fed.dembased.xyz/weighted

Meaning it is widely defederated, including by instances that have shorter block lists.

Anyway, that whole list is ugly.

3 more...

I have to know what the Detroit soccer team did to get so high on that list. Somebody here must know. Please!

it's a big pedo instance iirc

Really? I know they have a bunch of porn bots, I don't think I ever interacted with someone on there, just saw bot posts in my federated feed. I never noticed anything pedoish, but of course I don't click content warnings so I wouldn't know, I'm not interested in NSFW stuff on fedi.

That's how they were reported to fediseer iirc, or at least they care... So... Instant defed for me.

I was going to guess racially based comments about crime in detroit idk

I zoom in and this is the FIRST thing I see. What in the god damned shit?

And it's above Threads.net. Talk about priorities lol

Yeah, there are more further down in the list too. I was honestly shocked to see how many blatant pedo instances there were.

Makes me wonder about all the times that instances like lemmy.world got brigaded by child porn posters. Was it people against the fediverse, or just shit leaking in from the blatant pedo instances?

As long as the pedo shit is blocked i dont see why u would want to defederate instead of letting each user block what they want. We need a user level federated blocklist.

Anything illegal posted on a remote server will bring legal trouble to you as a server admin the moment it federates onto your instance. Therefore I completely understand them defederating from instances with a high risk of illegal activity.

3 more...

At least on Lemmy, defederating is also a way of banning all the instance's users from your communities. If you're constantly banning one instance's users and their admins seem fine with it, there's really no other way.

I wish I, an individual account, could defederate from instances, like some way to block all those instances' users.

the lemmy devs added per user instance blocks a while ago. Check your settings page

IIRC that only blocks posts though, not comments :/

I’m pretty sure it doesn’t block the users; I blocked the NSFW Lemmy, whatever the big one is, because of how much porn would be on the All feed otherwise. I was surprised to see a post or comment from someone whose account was on that instance a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t anything I didn’t want to see so overall I was glad the users are still able to participate elsewhere if that’s what they want.

Sort of. It does block the users, but only on your specific instance. If you’re interacting with a post on another instance and that instance is federated with them, you’ll still see them on that third instance.

Defederating basically takes the three instances from a closed triangle β—Ί (where all users can see and post on all three instances) to an open triangle ∟ (where your instance and the defederated instance are blocked from each other, but the third instance can still see and interact with both.)

Very interesting, thank you for the explanation.

Edit: is that just for defederation or also when I block an instance on my account?

That’s only for defederating. Blocking is local, and basically just hides the instance from your feed.

I don't think that blocks the users, just the posts? Or does it block users also?

Because in order to block content, the user first has to see it. If I were an instance admin, I wouldn't force my users to see any amount of N words and homophobic slurs, not even the once it takes to block it.

Hence tge need for a federated blocklist.

With a blocklist, the user is putting their trust in an unnamed group of people with essentially no accountability. With defederation, the user puts their trust in admins they can talk to, with a public modlog to explain every decision. You're proposing to take the same amount of control away from users, but with less accountability.

They are both essentially the same thing except u decided to call one group of unnamed people Admins and suddenly they have responsibility and authority.

The difference, and the best part of the fediverse imho, is that if you're not happy with someone elses rules you can become your own admin and set your own rules. The more we centralize power the further we go against that idea.

You can have the federated blocklist people named, decisions for adding to list public and explained. That way it would be the same as with admins

All that work just to make it the same as what we already have

I don't think you got the idea of a federated blocklist the other person was talking about

If you want to see far-right content and spam, join a far-right server or run your own, rather than trying to shame server owners into doing what you want.

Admins are entitled to decide what they platform and what they don't. On top of that, the user experience of "just block 100 servers of Nazis and incels to get to the content you want to see" is complete dogshit.

This "it should all be user level" is just apologist bullshit.

It's funny seeing how being able to see and discuss these decisions being the advantage of lemmy and admins and then seeing someone talking about defederation policies being "shaming" lmao. A bit dramatic

Did anybody say admins aren't entitled to block stuff? User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn't want.

Fuck off with this aggressive bad-faith shit.

Did anybody say admins aren't entitled to block stuff?

I mean, it’s a user complaining about defederation from known nazi instances. It gives off some big β€œfree speech absolutist (as long as the free speech is hate speech)” vibes.

User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn't want.

That system already exists. You can spin up your own instance in like 15 minutes, and have access to the entire unfiltered fediverse. But nobody wants to do that, because nobody actually wants to see the unfiltered fediverse. That shit is basically rawdogging the internet, because it’s full of extremists and pedophiles.

There is only one side who benefits from the β€œeverything unfiltered by default, the user has to individually wade through mountains of slurs, hate, doxxing, and child porn to manually block all of them” option. And it isn’t the user. The only side that benefits is the side that now gets to peddle their BS to a wider audience.

If you genuinely want the fediverse to improve and grow, advocating for unfiltering isn’t the way. That shit will scare off any curious new users faster than any kind of reasonable filtering would. Imagine you make a new account, and your first interactions are blocking a thousand individual instances just so you don’t end up on a federal watch list.

Did anybody say admins aren't entitled to block stuff

His "defederation bad (except pedos)" isn't exactly wet with support for blocking instances for spam and extremism.

User just wanted a system to see everything and block what they didn't want.

That system exists. It's the "run your own server" that I explicitly mentioned. But let's be honest, he doesn't want that system (which again, he already has) for himself, he wants it for everyone else.

It's the same bullshit that "free speech absolutists" push in every single thread about defederation -- admins should be hands off and users should dig through through slurs, racism, homophobia looking for content worth engaging with.

It benefits exactly one group of people but apparently doesn't set off your "bad-faith" radar.

Looked at the list and did a bit of searching as well as checking the reasons they were defederated. Looks like the top one is basically a trolling group akin to GNAA or some of the proto 4chan or SomethingAwful shit for those who remember back that far.

I can understand why overt trolling and possibly illegal content would be defederated.

That said I would like to see more diverse opinions and sources on my Lemmy feed though. There has to be a base somewhere that isn't literal nazis but isn't open socialists either.

That said I would like to see more diverse opinions and sources on my Lemmy feed though. There has to be a base somewhere that isn't literal nazis but isn't open socialists either.

Please, this. Lemmy is boring as all hell. 95%+ of users have the same opinions. It's a giant echo chamber.

You're free to sub to whatever instances you want. You seem to be complaining about your own inaction.

I do sub to whatever instances I want. And sometimes I go to All. It's called an observation. It's ok when people say things you disagree with.

3 more...

How bad are these that Hexbear didn't even make the list? Drilling through on the clickable version here makes it clear that the #1, poa.st, has the same basic content as Hexbear, but I'm assuming it's somehow way worse. Just imagine.

hexbear isn't even malicious. hexbear is spicy at best. not nearly as bad as lemmygrad, which is outright repugnant in its overt hostility. hexbear users are at least CAPABLE of communicating, whereas in my experience lemmygrad users pull the animal farm squealer move and defecate on the floor before storming out.

Hexbear suffers from the nazi bar problem, they're not ALL tankies, but they sure do hang out with a lot of them

I just don't have the time to sus out who's who and it's much easier (and less massive-shock-image-spamming) to use an instance that's defederated with them

"Naw guys, the tankie platform is fine I promise. Please let us them harass everyone again. Κ•β€’α΄₯β€’Κ”"

How did Hexbear ever harass everyone here? Lemmy.world never even federated with them for a second.

You're misunderstanding what I mean. .world's advent marked a paradigm shift where .ml was no longer the "default" lemmy instance. So long as hexbear was federated with the "default" lemmy instance, they were able to inflict their insanity on everyone else. Now .world provides a large part of lemmy insulation against them.

Yeah, every now and then I hop over to an account on another instance, and immediately remember why I tend to hang out on .world…

.world isn’t perfect, but holy hell some of the other instances are just buried in tankie BS.

I’m on hexbear. It’s a good community. It’s leftist though so conservatives and libruls won’t like it. But you can have a good argument and find like minded people.

The thing is, you can ONLY have a conversation with extremely like minded people. If you are not tip-of-the-left authoritarian, you are called a filthy lib and shunned.

Sadly it just suffers the same syndrome as that conservative sub on reddit: "Anyone who doesn't agree with me on every important and semi important point is literally the same as my worst enemy and I will fill their inbox with insults"

I disagreed with the way they often brigade posts and they said I was "indiscernible from the racist, fascist party" from my country. Like they went through the effort of looking up where I was from and the political parties there to find the most right wing one to name call and insult me with lol. That says a lot about the community culture, in my opinion.

It also has heavy Russian apologist content. Like, I even understand that MLs love China and excuse everything they do, but Russia is literally an right wing oligarchy with no health care and crippled social benefits that is led by an extreme right wing authoritarian fascist. I get that they are China's ally by the enemy-of-my-enemy principle, but that doesn't mean they are automatically good.

Not like over here, where I just mentioned another community I belonged to. Very differentπŸ˜’. Congratulations!

Ha, true. Well on the bright side, it looks like you only had one person insult you and they didn't try to dox you so at least the lashback is quite tame πŸ˜… I would call that a very positive experience if we were over there haha

Everyone hates everyone I guess...

lol the last time I was doxed was some MAGA freak on Nextdoor. Now that’s a fucking cesspool of filth…

It’s the kind of place you go when you are bored out of your mind, online and want to see some circus shit going on without being sprinkled in toxic dung

It’s horrible but stomachable and you get to see very special people you didn’t know exist. A living cautionary tale of going too far

I don’t have that experience at all. But I’m not there to try and win any battles. Lots of true allies.

I mean they are literally Mao Zedong figures with rainbow clothes it’s fucking bizzare. I never expected to see gay Chinese communists and queer soviets hence for me it’s like a trip

I only had similar feeling when seeing dark skinned Polish aryans neonazis, the clash of history is just too funny or at least it would be if it was a stand up comedy and they didn’t want to kill me on sight, just like the hexbears for that matter

In any case as long as you pretend to be one of em it’s always super nice, cult like, sisterhood but they have cute tendency for wanting to kill you immediately after you reveal yourself

I can see the broad strokes you are painting with. I’m not them, I’m there. That is all. Continue working to bring down the patriarchy!🏴🏴🏴🀘🏿

Before I blocked the instance I had nothing but miserable interactions with Hexbear users, and it had nothing to do with political opinions.

Shame. My condolences. When people feel this way it doesn’t help. Rock on, Comrade🀘🏿

It may well be "leftist", but it's also maximum authoritarian. Hexbears love fascism like a raccoon loves trash. If you're anything but a full-on Nazi, absolutely including being a genocide denier, you'll be relentlessly attacked on there.

Just not true. There are a lot of anarchists on there. In fact a large portion of their emotes are dedicated to left unity.

Left unity is a lie perpetuated by tankies so we'll be more compliant when they shove us against the wall.

Edit:after looking though the comment history, this account is clearly a Hexbear Alt. 24 in 2 months the last burst was over a month ago, and the first dealing directly with Hexbear.

Utter nonsense, left unity is real. And yes, I have accounts on both, I didn't realise that was a secret spy crime :)

Hexbear rules. 40 year old liberal tech nerds who grew up on American propaganda hate it because they hate change and congregations of young people.

I don't hate change, I hate Putin apologism from a space that claims to be left wing.

More to the point I hate brain dead takes like "voting is not harm reduction and if you don't go 3rd party in 2024 you're no better than a fascist"

they're neo nazi pedophiles iirc and in the brief time i was on a fedi instance federated with them i saw one of them trying to goad a trans person i knew with suicidal tendencies to kill herself because he thought it would be funny. like its so many orders of magnitude worst its just completely stupid to compare them at all. Like here's some of the defed reasons from the top of the incredibly long list of instances that have defedded it:

Nazi content
Racism
antisemitism, racism, homophobia
Nationalsozialistisches Gedankengut
Hate speech
racist slurs, anti-semitic stuff, etc
Nazisme, Transphobie, Racisme, Antisemitisme
Admins are having Nazi symbolics in their profile
racism, pedophilia, harassment
Serveur d'extrΓͺme droite / NΓ©onazi
Repeated harassment targetting specific users
Transphobia, Hate Speech, Nazi Symbology. Lack of Moderation.
Homophobia, transphobia
Hosting neonazis
transphobia / homophobia / racism / queerphobia / nazi combo instance

Lemmy instances comprise a relatively small part of the Fediverse.

I visited a few out of mindless curiosity and ignorance. I have no idea wtf I read and now the FBI is after me…

Can someone give me a brief rundown on what it means to be federated vs defederated? New to lemmy

Really basic summary

Federated means that instances are connected, i.e. lemmy.world accounts and posts can interact with sh.itjust.works ones.

Defederated means that one of the instances is blocked by the other, so all communication between the two is blacklisted.

Oh okay, that makes sense. And I'm assuming "Defederations" in the image is like the number of accounts in that defederated group?

It's the number of instances that have blocked them.

Accounts can't defederate afaik. There's a way to block instances on some apps, but it's client-side and really just hides posts from that instance.

Awesome, thanks for the explanation :) Now I'm curious as to what poa.st did/does to be so reviled

they're pedophile nazis who do harassment campaigns against minorities basically

I don't know the whole deal with them, but off the top of my head I know it's a very far-right social media site that was fairly mainstream for a while. It got a lot of media coverage after getting hacked, so I guess a lot of people ended up blocking it once they heard of it.

I don't know the full story. They were probably just a bunch of trolls like a lot of the other instances.

The number of instances, not accounts. The instance is the entire server. All of Lemmy.world would be one instance.

Worth noting that there are lots of people who also run personal instances off of their home server. So like they may be the only user in that instance, or have a few friends who use it too. And they would also count as one instance on this chart.

What is varishangout..net? Initially read it as yarishangout.net and wondered why a space for Toyota Yaris owners got defedded. Also wondering how stereophonic.space got defedded?

You thankfully appear to have not been exposed to a "proper" hexbear thread where all they can do to communicate is call you a shitlib for doing things like acknowledging genocide.

Do you have examples? I am not doubting, since I've seen loads of people saying it. But I've never come across it myself.

I have the entire instance blocked in my client, so I can't even go searching for a thread for you. But if you don't, it should be incredibly easy to poke the hexbear, so to speak. Lemme grab you a link...

Here, this one should work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_China

Find an appropriate sublemmy on Hexbear and post this, ideally in a context that explicitly declares you oppose genocide. You'll get nothing but the following in your thread:

  1. Accusations that you are a "shitlib". Any attempt by you to find out what this word means will result in additional mockery.
  2. Denials of the Uyghur genocide.
  3. Adoration of the CCP, especially Xi Jinping (but Hexbear likes any authoritarian tyrant in China, so any CCP politician may end up adulated).

I do agree that the hard left seems to enjoy using "liberal" as an insult, knowing that what most Americans interpret as "liberal" is different than the academic definition they use. It needlessly diverts the conversation and makes them think they're superior.

Saying "shitlib" is even worse. Basically an adhom attack, not acceptable when the other party is being civil and respectful.

On #2 and #3, I don't think that is relevant to the original accusation. Of course they will uphold their own views. But #1 is very valid. Though I wish to see examples of it because I have not.

Lol. Absolute nonsense. Every time anyone is asked for an example of bad Hexbear behaviour they can only ever say "I HAVE NO EXAMPLES BUT I PROMISE IT WILL HAPPEN". Speak about other people like they're human beings pl0x

You mean like all the biden supporters on here defending his support for genocide?

Yeah? Can you provide even 1 example of someone on Hexbear posting something a) civil and b) not fascist?

https://hexbear.net/post/2648774?scrollToComments=false

Their top stickied post seems to be a biography of a 19th century French anarchist. That's about as 10/10 wholesome chungus as it gets.

Past that, the front page is mostly full of screenshots of other social media posts mixed in with the occasional news item.

This guy is asking for help meeting people because he's an introvert.

This is a meme about the Roman Empire being a vector for olive trees.

Like, this isn't a difficult challenge.

How can anyone read any of this? The graphic is unreadable to me.

Some mobile clients open the thumbnail version of images. If you instruct your client to open the image in a browser, you'll see that the url has thumbnail instructions appended to the end and those can be trimmed off of the end to show the full image.

What mobile clients are those and why are people using them? The image displays perfectly in Voyager.

On sync at least if you open tall images from the post it will be readable.

I'm using Voyager. I can zoom in on the image

The only things I know about Kiwifarms is that it was a federated instance and that Cloudflare got flak for not taking them down sooner.

Wow, there’s a lot more pedophilia stuff on there than I initially realized. Really blatant shit too? I’m surprised that’s even allowed without the feds cracking down on it immediately, because the whole point of ActuvityPub is that everything is open. So how the hell do the pedos manage to hide their tracks?

Now I have to use a second account to visit the fine folks at #freecumextremist

lol. I'm pawoo user

describe pawoo to me

Decided to check it out to figure out what was going on. There's 'anime women look young' and then there's straight up lolicon. DO NOT the pawoo

Edit : There were also like celebrity deepfakes, but that really feels like an afterthought

Good that threads.net is in top 50 but I would've liked to see it higher. Right now it is at 39th place.

Edit: Also what is the source for the picture?

~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~

Thank you.

For me a lot of the interesting part isn't which instances are being defederated, but why. Giving a quick glance, most defed reasons seem to be fairly sensible, with only a few being assumptive or outright idiotic (like blanket top domain defederation).

I like that clicking on the instance shows the reason given (if any) for each defederation.

My favorite:

abusive admin - threatened to send Hillary Clinton feet pics. Also, pedo

2 more...
24 more...

Is this your overview? If so maybe you could decode some of the punycode in the domains

I see one up there, срёт[.]ΠΎΠ½Π»Π°ΠΉΠ½, "shit dot online"

Weird, nr 86 doesn't seem to be decoded.

sign up to a non pedo instance that list and you'll actually see and talk about stuff instead of having a leftoid circle jerk.

Yeah, lovely conversations about how jews control the world, how non-whites are destroying the world, how "certain people" being genocided wouldn't be bad

#2 represent! Getting defederated is street cred. If crybabies don't like you you're doing something right.

I don't mess with fedi anymore though, besides dicking around on here. Socially I'm all about Nostr now, it's the future of the non corpo social media, federated network architecture is simply too prone to abuse.

Nostr will just end up like voat

I think "#2 represent" is referring to their membership at freespeechextremist, so they are likely looking forward to wallowing in a festering cesspool of hatred.

Nah I leave that shit to the guys at the #1 spot on the list lol. I just say what I want. I'm actually not into being angry and hateful, but I'm also not into being told what I can and cannot say.

What are you being told you cannot say that you want to say?

It's not about what I want to say lol typical. Take a conversation about principle and imply that I want to shout slurs.

You don't have the right to dictate to me what I can say out loud, period.

Who implied you want to shout slurs? I'm asking about the principle. What are you wanting to say that other instances are stopping you from saying? What is anyone even dictating that you cannot say out loud?

"On principle what specific words do you want to say" lol yeah OK. You need to go understand what "principle" means, by definition it ignores specific circumstances.

When what I can say is subject to someone else's dictat, de facto they have power over me. The interesting thing about that is that the kind of people that seek that out aren't the kind of people who wield it wisely or fairly. I avoid giving others power over me, I can't always prevent it, but I avoid it where I can. That's the principle we are talking about, whether I want to give someone that power, not whether I agree with them on what words should be said. And that's what this whole speech shit is about, not words, it's about power. Generally I would agree with those people on what words should not be said, what I don't agree with is giving them the power to tell me or other people that we can't say them. I used to do the compromise thing, but those people inevitably overreach and begin to try to control what ideas are allowed to be discussed, because again, it's about power and they're power hungry subhuman scum who just want to dominate others.

No matter where you go on fedi, it's one type of toxic or another. Either it's people shouting the n word, or it's people sharing drawings (at best) of little kids, or it's power hungry subhuman scum who just want to dominate others. It's an architectural problem endemic to the federated network architecture. So I prefer an architecture with less discoverability but which gives the user the power to censor their own feed how they see fit. There's no real reach on either, but at least people can have their echo chambers and nobody can lean on the architecture to silence the people they don't like.

There's a lot of referring to people as subhuman scum in there, so I am starting to see the gist of why you gravitate to something like that instance.

10 more...
10 more...
10 more...
10 more...
10 more...
10 more...
10 more...

Lmao I remember going all in on Voat for like 2 days before I realized everyone else there was a nazi

That's actually nor possible because there's no global feed. Your network is what you make of it. I'm not a fan of voat types so I don't interact with them online all that often.

It's interesting, the people that tell you that they're in the majority somehow also believe that online spaces that are left for open discussion don't wind up the way they want them to, almost as if they're a minority.

Or they're just not interested in wading through far-right extremists for 3 shitty memes.

After all, if your theory about "open spaces turn into Nazis and pedos because most people are secretly Nazis and pedos" were actually true, those sites would be the biggest sites in the world, not tiny little bubbles that last 6 months.

That's the great thing, without servers and global feeds you don't have to wade through anything.

It's not my theory, saying "without heavy handed moderation places turn into Nazis" is jot the same as saying "tiny little spaces designed to cater to Nazis turn into nothing but Nazis." I'm arguing about the former statement, not whatever it is you're saying here.

Has nothing to do with minority and all to do with toxicity

That's a big part of why I have abandoned fedi actually, pretty much the while dn network is full of toxicity. I think k it's an emergent property of the network architecture.

10 more...

What's are a good three websites that you recommend using the protocol?

damus.io, snort.social and coracle.social seem to he popular sites, but nostr isn't sites like the fediverse is. It's a network made up of relays and clients, and the clients can be web clients or they can be applications on your phone or computer. I'm partial to client applications, but to dip your toes in going to a web client like the ones above work good.

I will ALAWYS use the web client over an app, even when they deliberately make the web client shitty to force people on the app, because fuck them trying to track my device usage to sell my data.

Case-in-point, I use the Voyager web client so I don't need to use the fucking app.

So thank you for providing those web client sites.

Well, often Nostr clients are open source and have no telemetry. I personally prefer native applications when I can verify that that is the case.

10 more...