Has anyone defederated your instance? Introducing Defederation Investigator
defed.xyz
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/113726
I couldn't find any tools to check this, so I built one myself.
This is a little site I built: the Defederation Investigator defed.xyz. With it, you can get a comprehensive view of which instances have blocked yours, as well as which ones you are federated with.
The tool is open source and available on GitHub. Hopefully someone will find it useful, enjoy.
You should probably cache results so users aren’tspamming other instances
Since I was using this to write a little defederation thing on which instances find hexbear so repulsive they had to defederate I noticed the number from exploding-heads go up quite a bit from the 75 to 170 now. I will make it a point to call out two specific instances for being hilariously disgusting feddit.de aka the german federation, and feddit.dk both defederated hexbear but didn't defed the outright nazi instance exploding-heads earlier today, class act from the german and danish mod team.
Also apparently they were aware of it two months ago but didn't chose to act until today which yeah class act from the german admins. https://feddit.de/post/1151473?scrollToComments=true
There's a cheap dark joke in there somewhere about Germans and Nazis
I live in Germany and can guarantee it's not a joke. Antifa is very much needed here.
Yeah a lot of germans are full on
which is incredibly bleak because the SPD is full on let's cut the education budget in half in fact we need to do so much austerity, Linke is well Linke. So yeah, I hate german libs a lot but I feel so sorry for my german comrades.
What's up with Linke? Anything particularly spicy?
I don't know if I want to harp on them too much, die Linke is pretty much only a thing in eastern germany. The west germany has basically suppressed them heavily, first by what some historians would call a 'colonization' of east germany due to just how fucking bad reunification was for eastern germany, as well as deliberate neglect by western germany letting the situation spiral out of control. A lot of Die Linke politicians were also illegally surveilled and harassed and were often smeared as red fash using horseshoe theory stuff.
This leads us to now where they just suck like they are to the left similar to how AOC is to the left of Biden unable/unwilling to do anything so they'll keep losing ground to the AfD they'll not get anywhere.
They've slowly bled voters because they spent the last couple years with infighting and are now about to split into a pro-imperialist ineffectual radlib wing and a transphobic social reactionary wing, which may lead to both new parties being too weak to make it into parliament any longer
Isn't Germany's antifa infested with antideutsch crazies?
You mean vigilante-style attacks on healthband life because you oppose their world view? You Germans have come full circle.
Enlightened German centrism.
As far as I can see, feddit has always had exploding-heads defedded? https://fba.ryona.agency/?reverse=feddit.de
feddit.de blocks exploding heads.
By and large feddit.de is to the left of /r/de which was already center-left.
...but whatever fits your narrative, I guess.
obviously a mistake?
Not checking easily verifiable information when going on a "muh they block tankies but not nazis" rant, essentially accusing the instance itself of being a Nazi cesspit, doubly sus when doing it to a German instance, is quite a mistake, yes.
Also: Just checked, feddit.dk also blocks exploding heads. Both at least since 2023-06-15 (as per fba.ryona.agency). So two out of two wrong, nice, "but didn’t defed [...] exploding-heads earlier today" wrong, nice, that's framed as if he just checked "earlier today", and a fellow hexbear giving moral support to spreading malicious gossip instead of calling it out. And then you folks ask why people don't like you.
I know why you specifically don't like us lol. I recognize your username from the constant long arguments with hexbear users I see you get into.
You make a point that you have no idea what you are talking about but spread missinformation.
The post you are referring to was a federated cross-post, besides that archive.org from 2 month ago proves you are wrong:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230612194607/https://feddit.de/instances
Exploding heads looks fucking dead lol why bother?
Looks like the usage may have gone over Vercel's usage policy (I'm not super familiar with Vercel)? I see the following when trying to bring it up:
That's very useful, thank you @Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
Just to note if copying the URL you have to strip off the https:// or else it won't work (maybe people just don't copy that these days, but I ran in to that problem anyway).
Uh yeah that is true. This was a one afternoon project, so I kinda threw the frontend together without thinking too much of it. I guess truncating the protocol instead of relying on the users doing it makes sense.
Also: tested it on mobile. And my probe capitalized the first letter, returning an “instance not found”.
Noted, adding a forced
.toLowerCase(). I'm implementing all of the feedback I've received thus far right now.Awesome!
@infamousbelgian@waste-of.space @Mane25@feddit.uk both changes have been pushed and deployed, thank you for your feedback.
Literally the first link on join-lemmy.org has a table showing all instances and it shows both how many instances that instance is blocking "and* how many other instances are blocking that instance
https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
how's that helpful if you don't know which ones
Very cool, ive been wondering about who defeds the most and now I know. Thanks.
ok, it seems to be working 😆
even lemmynsfw defederated them, lol 🤣 why?
For what it's worth hexbear wouldn't have federated with them anyway because the site is staunchly against hosting NSFW content.
they are are extremely obnoxious mix of tankies and some other leftists who might have been slightly less obnoxious if they were on their own, but being in the group with said tankies, you don't want them any more than the former
i apologize for grammar structure of my sentence and hope it makes some sense
if you have few days of time to kill you can check this thread where lemm.ee admin is asking lemm.ee users about their opinion on defederating them. they brigade the thread in such a way they make more than 77% of the 2k comments in the thread (not exaggerating - the thread has 1920 comments when viewed from lemm.ee and 425 when viewed from lemmy.world which blocks them) and explain their philosophy in the process. so you will understand stuff like "who absolutely needs to be murdered for the crime of having more money than you in order to make world more just place & other tankies' wisdom".
you have to acknowledge that they did really good job of introducing themselves, though - i had no idea they even existed the day before that thread and i am firm proponent of "defederate. now." today 😆
I don't know why you are shocked and horrified when people engage with something on their own front page?
That's how federation works, is it not?
It's not brigading, it's literally right there at the top of the front page, so of course people will comment on it.
It certainly wouldn't be brigading if the ratio of hexbear comments was proportional to its size. But I haven't seen many lemmy.world comments there, for example, and they saw the thread in their feeds just as much as you did.
Federation works by connecting various instances with different goals and different userbases. Those instances need a space to discuss those goals among themselves, where the admins can communicate with the users, etc. Some external engagement is to be expected, but one specific instance creating 3x more comments than all the others taken together (including the instance whose policy is supposed to be discussed) should, uh, raise an eyebrow.
Honestly it sounds about right. Prior to federation our news megathreads occasionally broke 1k comments over a week, and that's only a small subset of the userbase. Hexbear users have cultivated a culture that encourages being more online, and we were already extremely online. No downvotes, for instance, means that if you disagree with someone you have to comment, and we obviously disagree with the political opinions held by the majority of people so there's quite a bit there. Also worth noting that if an admin/mod expressly calls for us not to comment on a post, as was the case on the second defederation discussion post on blahaj, we won't.
I'm surprised at how reasonable and self reflective you are. Breaking the instances stereotype a tad
But, you bring up a point that I've always wondered about. Why would an instance not have downvotes? If I hosted an instance I'd prefer to not implement upvotes rather than ever getting rid of downvotes, considering they are basically required to filter out the bad faith content without engaging with it.
Well there's where the hexbear magic happens. If we see bad faith content it's basically open seasons to very vocally inform the poster how bad faith their post is.
I could imagine that this often leads to harassment. Are there any measures in place to prevent that?
If by harassment you mean getting piled on for the bad faith take, then no there's nothing except the offenders self-crit to prevent that.
If by harassment you mean a user that posted a bad take getting followed and dragged in other threads, then yes. Mods take action to prevent that. Everyone has a right to disengage at HB
Fair enough
when approached in good faith, 90%+ of Hexbears will level with you
When NOT approached in good faith (90% of the time) we don't react as well
I believe the original reason was that there were people downvoting trans positive content, and this let people be transphobic anonymously. (Conversely, transphobic content can easily be removed by moderators.)
And let's be honest, despite what reddit people might say, people don't only downvote bad faith content, they use the downvote as a "disagree" button.
Early in the history of the site, some bigots were finding trans users and then downvoting all of their posts and comments. The admins confirmed this, and went through and banned the offending accounts, but they just made alts, so the permanent solution was to eliminate the downvotes. Our moderation is so strict that bad faith arguing is banned on sight.
Also we're not as scary as all the libs would have you think. We're just, again, extremely online, generally confrontational, and have political views outside the norm. All this adds together to make us abrasive when we have to explain something that's taken for granted on our instance for the 50th time.
::: spoiler Also we have more emojis than anyone can remember, some of which render as giant on every other instance. Spoilered is a picture of a cartoon pig pooping which I'm using as a demonstration because I know it's one of the giant ones, and also one other emoji as a treat
:::
Thank you for the reply. It's very informative
That's what PPB is for
queerphobic people were downvoting people just because they were gay/trans/etc, so we took note of those people, banned them, and removed downvotes so it couldnt happen again
if you see bad faith or shitty content you just tell the poster they're a loser
like so:
edit: I'm not calling you a loser but the ppb usually functions as a downvote. You either argue with someone or just bully them with ppb until they leave the site or the mods ban them
Remember, emojis are bugged so that ppb is the size of the entire webpage for everyone but us
Have you ever seen how active our site is for its size? What you're getting is just the normal amount of organic engagement when you offer our most prolific posters the opportunity to dunk on the most braindead libs outside of reddit.
Why would there be a large proportion of lemmy.world comments when the thread is literally about hexbear? You don't expect hexbear users to have stronger opinions on that than lemmy.world users?
Imagine you've got 100,000 people in a room. Let's say they're split between people wearing blue shirts, green shirts, and red shirts. But it's not an even split. Half of the people in the room are wearing red shirts. Someone in a blue shirt steps up onto the stage and says, "Open discussion everyone: I think red shirts are assholes and we should kick them all out of the room."
What exactly do you expect to happen next?
That's not what the thread in question was. We were invited to join the discussion. If we had not been welcome to join the discussion, we would have stayed out of it.
Regarding the analogy:
it's not one but multiple connected rooms
the room with people in red shirts has suddenly decided to connect with the rooms with the less numerous blue and green shirts
it's not "someone" in a blue shirt, it's a significant number of people in blue shirts who think the red ones should simply return to their own room that they were perfectly happy with until now
https://lemm.ee/post/4543536
Where exactly do you see the invitation? I see "I am very interested to hear thoughts and responses from our own users."
go back to reddit. this is the fediverse, the entire point is that these are not, in fact, "separate" rooms. being connected is the default. that's why it requires a giant discussion to kick anyone out.
It was posted publicly to all federated communities and absolutely no indication was made that the majority of people to whom the post was sent were unwelcome to participate.
On Hexbear, we have a rule that we have to leave meta discussions of other instances alone if they want us to. All the admin had to say was, "lem.ee users only" and we would've stayed out. If you refuse to take such a simple measure to restrict discussion to your own community, you do not actually want to restrict discussion to your own community.
And the admin didn't. You can go ask him. He was not trying to keep hexbear users out or in any way offended by the fact that we participated in the discussion. Why are you (a member of neither instance) offended on his behalf?
Don't hate us because we post like gods gift to the internet.
You just cant match the raw power of our posting skills and that makes you feel weak and pathetic. As it should.
Is that why you haven't stopped whining about us ever since
No better boner killer than people spamming mao's dong.
I normally hate the whole de-federation thing, but the radlib chapocels there are annoying af.
Radlib isn't one I've heard yet! Would you mind saying a little more about why you think hexbears are radlibs?
of course no response /:
Fucking same boring interactions over and over, and never any follow through!
They probably thought I was going to make fun of them if they elaborated
I wasn't though, I just wanted to see what they'd say!
You gave me like five hours to reply lmao.
I’m not used to people who take 2 days to respond to forum posts they involve themselves in
I’ll wait patiently this time, sorry :)
They're wrong, we're regular
s
Someone who claims to be a socialist, but who has a pathological obsession with identity politics and dividing the working class, and gives little regard to class consciousness or worker solidarity. Usually has an extreme hatred of patriotism despite patriotic socialism being the official ideology of the Soviet Union. Often defends lumpen behaviour to a bizarre extent.
Did I miss anything?
Wait, you think hexbear "gives little regard to class consciousness or worker solidarity"? You think we're only claiming to be socialist? You think we have a "pathological obsession with identity politics"? I would disagree about all of the above, honestly. I will grant you that I'm not a big fan of patriotism, because I live in the imperial core, and there is nothing good about america. Also, could you give me an example of what "lumpen behavior" you think we're defending?I just realized, I have no desire to get in Yet Another Internet Argument. Please do not answer the above questions unless you really, really want to for some reason. Thanks for explaining your thinking, I very much disagree with you, but that's ok! This is a 2 day old thread at this point and I'm trying to be less of an argumentative butthole online, so I'll just say, I hope you have a great day!
Guess I overdid the hyperbole, it probably came across stronger than intended, sorry.
wen u no wat werds meen
Fuck off pronoun boy.
Imagine not having pronouns.
the tale of the boy without pronouns
oh fuck we've been owned
there are a lot of <250 user instances on that list.
They would probably never see their local content again
Thank you for this, @Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
Oh I forgot about this community. Thank you for spreading the word.
You are welcome, thank you for your work!
6 instances have. Out of 1350ish.
A total of 29 users. Oh my.
Thanks, bookmarked!
Just linking a similar tool because I haven't seen it being mentioned yet: https://fba.ryona.agency/
It's made by kiwifarms though, they even included their favorite word at the end of the page.
I didn't know, thanks for letting me know. I frankly do not care though, in the exact same way that I do not care that Lemmy is made by tankies.
The interesting bit would be how people with these extreme agencies abuse these tools or their users to further their goals.
As I see it, both cases are questionable people providing useful tools free for me to use. Wether I use these tools or not, has what impact in regards to their agenda? I certainly would not like to be a pawn in their game, or support their cause without consent.
If you think that's what happens, please show me. That would be very interesting to know and might lead to me ceasing usage / recommendation.
Lemmy devs may have controversal political views, but their software is written with a good intention. KiwiFarms on the other hand use it to target instances.
I just see no reason to use a tool made by controversial people with awful intention if there's a good alternative with no such controversies. But you can decide for yourself, I just wanted to inform.
Not just that, in all interactions with them, I've never found the devs to be anything but respectful.
Well, that is partially because they leave the less respectful interactions to their alt-accounts ;)
But yes, the software is written with good intentions.
True!
I haven't heard of them. What are they about?
Seems like a forum with a focus on targeted trolling and harassment. There's a wiki page on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms
Oh I think Danny Brown mentioned this on one of his podcasts. Thanks.
I'm not sure how the developer's intention or leaning affects me. Or how my usage or non-usage affects their intention or leaning, or how they can act on it. Maybe my usage provides data for them to improve their tools? But since the tools themselves are agnostic, I'm not sure how that's a bad thing either.
Strictly speaking about functionality, I saw no alternative which is on par to the .agency tool. It has more features, is faster, provides more information and causes less strain on network servers. At least that's my quick impression.
Anyways, thanks for the conversation!
Let's go even further than that. Let's say that the most annoying people around the whole Fediverse are Hexbear. On the worst days, all they do is to organize to spam specific threads, which is indeed annoying, but that's the extent of it. KiwiFarms is responsible for harassing people until they commit suicide for the heinous crime of being weird. Anyone aware of this who wants to associate with them has no place in civilized society.
What I'd really like to have is a tool that lists blocked communities. That information is not as public as defederated instances.
aaaand it's down. worked this morning but now it fails with PAYMENT_REQUIRED
Neat tool!
any reason why sopuli.xyz isn't included?
You can ask the creator (see the original post that I crossposted)
Wait why is “dubvee.org” defederated from my instance? Interesting…
Ask them and report back.
They don’t have any contact info, I guess I should PM from another instance.
Its really strange since there is no porn, controversial opinions or else on the instance.
Might be your TLD blocked by whatever firewall they're using?
Nope it was about a removed community. They're refederated now.
Looks like the only people not federated with the midwest are super small instances that aren't federated a big way with anyone.
We got 10 detractors!
It doesn't recognize kbin.social? Maybe I input the url incorrectly. Just curious
Only works with Lemmy instances I think, I'm not sure what the technical reasons are.
@Mane25
No, it seems to work with my Mastodon instance - regarding Lemmy servers only. I just ttied https://defed.xyz/check/social.freetalklive.com It works spectacularly. :-)
@Chetzemoka
Actually you're right and kbin.social works as well, I should have checked.
IF YOUR WAIFU WAS REAL SHE WOULDN'T LIKE YOU. :blobcatsipglare: YOU'RE A SUCKER. KILL YOURSELF, BECAUSE NO HITMAN SHOULD EVER HAVE THE DISPLEASURE OF INTERACTING WITH YOU. :uniinsane:.
Excuse me?
I think it only recognizes as "valid", lemmy instances. But kbin will be searched and it at least listed those instances federated with me.
It says no instance found but specifically says Jengo hates you..
I can see federated instances and 1 defederated even though it says no instance found (I think the tool is still case sensitive btw)
Did this stop working?
Man... beehaw fucking sucks
Why?
Its an echochamber that defederated whit most instances, and they very good at gatekeeping since if you try to sign up in there they ask you for an esay to sign up like if they where hot shit and theres a 30% chance they acctually let you in, and the moderation in there is pretty ban heavy and the admins are pretty much reddit mods that love to keep their echochambers closed. So thats why.
OK. So? It's their instance, their rules. I don't get it. You don't like it, go to a different instance and live your life.
Sure but that doesn't mean we can't criticize these instances for their stupid decisions.
Why? It's like criticizing what someone does in their own house.
And? Say they throw all their recyclables in the garbage or in their yard. Should I not criticize someone for that?
Or maybe they have a rape dungeon in their basement.
Those things affect other non consenting people. If someone voluntarily joins an instance with mod policies you dislike a) it's their choice b) they are free to leave whenever and move to a different instance
A lot of people on these large instances dont even know they've been defederating from other instances. I have yet to see any instance that actually votes on whether or not they should defederate and it seems wholly decided by the admins of said instance.
Now you understand what an admin is.
Username checks out.
Otherwise thats what im doing, and i just complain about it cuz i can and dont agree with their methods. Im not ddosing them or trolling in there. They do them and continue to suck at it imho. And besides i just answered cuz someone else asked me why i think it sucks.
I think it has mostly friendly and mature discussion there. I'd have my account there if they federated more, but that's my choice as it is theirs.
Yes they want to be a safe space for their users, if some people want to talk on the internet without being harassed I’m happy for them
True, but they are not very welcoming either, or inclusive if you will.
interesting. ty
@Blaze Very cool! Thank-you.
Great tool! Thank you for creating and sharing it!
This won't be abused at all...
Will it though? It's essentially public info already, and is a core part of how Lemmy works.
Definitely, but I can see what the TC is saying. This tool simplifies the process even further for troll(s) who campaign against those trying to evade them.
It also simplifies the process for people trying to avoid the trolls.
How can it be abused and to what end? You can go to any (instanceurl)/instances to see what it's federated to.
A similar tool has existed for years and it is run by Kiwifarms with the primary purpose of ban evasion for trolling and harrassment campaigns.
KF has a fedi site?
sadly yes.
who is kiwifarms?
You are lucky that you don't know. But people elsewhere in this thread have explained already.
thanks for letting me know, i found a wikipedia link in the thread.
You get a list of the instances that have defederated from you, and you mount a coordinated attack against them
Yeah the only polite response, until we end in M.A.D. those poor botnet owners need a hand.
No I'm just saying how this can be used in an attack. I'm certainly not advocating attacks of any kind.
Same here, I was just attempting to joke.
Ahhh my bad. Fell for Poe's Law lol
On mastodon, in my circles at least, it's taboo to link to the equivalent for mastodon. It makes any harassment campaigning, trolling and re-routing much easier. Unless you're willing to build the tool yourself, you just don't really know these numbers. Once you use the tool (and I have seen and used it), you see very easily who the big defederators etc are.
I'm going to bet that this tool is not worth what ever value or curiosity it provides. It so easily puts targets on instances backs, including smaller instances that are probably easy targets.
I think it's probably the most important piece of information to have when choosing a server.
While a lot of people have said "it can be used for harassment", I've not seen any information yet on how that could be. On the contrary, I think being open and up-front about federation policies is important for a healthy community - it avoids arguments about going behind people's backs.
I'm with you on the transparency and policies. Completely.
But there's a big difference between
policiesand a public page that tells the trolls "you have been defederated by all of these people".