Alternative to defederation
I hope this is the right place to discuss a potential feature for lemmy.
I've been reading a lot of the defederation calls from instances and their users. More often than not, this was due to very specific elements of those instances; trolls, extremists, etc... But in my opinion, defederating a whole instance because of that is a sad pity.
I was thinking a way to solve this would be to have a federated blacklist. Instance Admins would ban user accounts from their instance and that would be added to a list that could be consulted/automatically used by other instance owners. They would ideally be able to set parameters, like banning users from a list accepted by a number of other instances, a specific reason for the ban, or banned by specific instances.
This would lessen the administrative load, protect instances, allow different instances with shared concerns to help each other while allowing their own users to interact with the 'compatible' users and communities from other instances.
Just an idea and wanted to bring it up and hear some thoughts.
I think a better solution would be to let individual users block instances they don’t want. Shouldn’t be much different from blocking communities and users. This is just a combination of the two
This is the way imo. I'd personally like to see the culture of the fedi shift more towards self-moderation by users, let the users decide for themselves what individuals, communities, or servers they want or don't want to see.
Yes, this would mean that you'd be responsible for thinking for yourself, but imo that added slight burden is worth the freedom that is supposedly the reason the fedi exists.
My masto server does this (beyond who defederated us because we don't wholesale block the same people they block) and it works just fine for me, I just banned the Nazi instance (cause duh), the wolf-gender instance (it's all they talk about and I'm just not interested, I'm sure they're fine people), the Loli-art instance (cause duh), and the futa-bot (it's spam, a lot of it, and I'm not into futa), and I'm gtg, just wish the reactionary instances that I'd be fine with weren't so cliquey as to ban my instance for allowing it's users to think for themselves, but c'est la vie.
That would be like counting stars
This is a lot of work if you're just trying to browse the site. Instead of spending hours blocking instances after first checking whether an instance is mostly bots (and safe to block) or if it's just a single group of bots in an otherwise fine instance in which case you block the users, a general list like OP suggested would be more useful.
I don’t see how it’s more complicated than blocking a user or a community. Instances is nothing but a group of communities and users at the highest level
I want both. I want admin to be able to defederate and I want to be able to block instances myself. A good example is that furry porn instance keeps coming up with new communities I need to block individually. I would rather block the whole thing.
I think that should happen too
This would be good to have, but an admin should still be able to silence or block communities and, in the worst case, defederate.
Everything's early still and it'll take time until the right tools have been built.
Usually there are two reasons for defederation:
A instance that has no intentions to co-exist peacefully in the federation and the problem starts with the admins. This warrants a permanent defederation.
A instance that is temporarily overwhelmed by trolls or has grown too big to have any efficient moderation and thus poses a thread to the federation. This usually warrants a temporary defederation but can at times require a permanent one if the admins are not cooperating in getting things under control (by which it becomes a case 1.)
Your proposal solves neither and automated ban-lists like that have a much higher risk of silent abuse than a very public defederation that needs to be well justified.
I think that's a simplistic view. We've seen people defederating or asking for defederation for the existence of a single community. Just because instance admins have different ideas of what's tolerable doesn't mean the rest of the communities at large can't collaborate.
The point where admins would have settings to accept/review ban lists was to reduce the risk of abuse
If you are talking about the recent the_Donald case that this is not a matter of different opinions. That community on Reddit has a long history of not willing to co-exists peacefully and if an admin does not draw a clear line that such communities are not welcome on their instance then it is a clear case of the above 1).
I think some people reacted a bit too quickly to that sublemmy appearing though.. Give admins some time to evaluate and resolve the situation before impulsively defederating an entire 6000-user instance.
As far as I know this is exactly what happend. Just because there where some vocal users asking for defederation doesn't mean the admins thought the same.
However, in the case of an ongoing troll attack quick temporary defederation is a useful tool for which the benefits outweight the damage it does.
Idk ban lists are a gateway for abuse especially for minorities, see the gamergate ban lists which included trans people for no reason
This is why I was suggesting you would have conditions to apply these bans, for example that other admins you trust are applying them
Yeah maybe there is a system to make them work, I also don’t like taking lightly defederation, however there should be a strict control of the rules for adding people to the list
Bans are already propagated across instances. I've got close to 2,300 banned users on my personal instance.
Can you choose which ones to apply and which ones not to?
No. If they get banned from their home instance it propagates federation-wide. If they get banned outside of their home instance, it only applies on that instance.
What exactly is the point of that list? If the user is banned on their home instance i would think there account would become locked so their home instance wouldn't allow them to post on another instance anyways.
You are correct.
The value is part of the person object so it just propagates naturally. Whether remote instances actually act on the information in any way other than populate the BANNED USERS list in the Admin UI, I don't know. As you pointed out, they can't login in the first place.
Ahh that makes sense if it is just part of the user object.
You can unban them
While you technically can unban them it won't really have any effect since they can't login to their home instance where the ban took place.
Instance admins can ban users that aren't on their own instance. I can ban you, right from your comment. Of course this only affects my instance.
Those must be bans from communities, I assume. A community is linked to a single instance so it can control who is banned. But banning a user from an instance is only meaningful on that single instance. At least that's my understanding..
Those are bans where the user has been banned from their home instance. It actually doesn't make a lot of sense that they show up in our admin panels since a user banned from their home instance won't be able to authenticate and access remote instances with that account.
Oh, yeah in that case I guess Lemmy propagates this information so other instances can show the "banned" information on a user profile.
Exactly, though I'd like to get a PR in to not show that on the admin screen, or in the very least to make the list collapsed by default. I think I'll work on that today.
Best I can tell, from limited experimentation, is that if you get banned on your home instance it propagates across the federation. If you get banned on a remote instance it only reflects on that instance.
Idk how all this works, but I just set up my own instance yesterday, and I already have tons of accounts on the ban list. I'm not adding them, but I can see in the modlogs that someone is adding them, and they are automatically getting banned from my instance. Maybe this already exists?
That's admins of other instances you're federating with banning people from their own instances.
Then why do they show up in the ban list for my instance? I didn't add them.
Sorry for the random comment, but I'm seeing you everywhere. Here and in the Lemmy Github issues. Very memorable name somehow :)
lol I wouldn't be surprised if it did and I didn't know about it
It does surprise me because from what I've been reading the mod tools and ban capabilities were... limited
This exists, but it is not entirely clear to me how it works and what criteria it needs to fulfill to show up on that federated ban-list in Lemmy.
Honestly degenerating whole instances (particularly the larger instances like with beehaw and Lemmy world) is pretty harmful to the health of the fediverse imo.
Really hope communities can find a better way forward.
The health of the fediverse depends on smaller instances existing. The fact that larger "untouchable" instances exist at all is harming the fediverse as we speak. Mastodon folk are already familiar with this problem regarding dot social & dot online.
I am not sure how we won't always have large instances when we want large communities.
Communities are directly tied to instances. If you have a large community you naturally will have a large instance.
Communities are not exclusive to people from their own instances. Otherwise single-user instances like the one I'm replying from would be impossible.
But communities are exclusive to their instance. That is what I am try to get at. If we want large communities naturally we are going to get large instances.
Not only that but if an instance has a large community odds are good traffic from the large community will help the other communitys on that instance to grow as well. At least that is how my experience has been. Someone linked to a community on another instance, i looked at that community and also looked at the other communitys on that instance.
At some point does it really matter where the user accounts are hosted when all of the users just go to the same community on the single large instance.
Communities are not exclusive to an instance. I really don't know where you get that false impression.
And it is extremely easy for a community to switch to another instance, something that is much harder for thousands of user accounts on an overly large instance.
I am getting it from the community link.
For example asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Please let me know how i am wrong. And why Because i would love to be wrong. But as far as i know that is a community is directly tied into the lemmy.ml instance. If that server goes away I believe that community also goes away. If it doesn't go away then what would be the new link?
Wouldn't all the users need to move over to the new community as well? Sure if there was time for coordination maybe. But if a community dies on my feed I might not realize for a long time unless i am specifically seeking it out.
Being part of an instance doesn't mean that it is exclusive to it at all if you can participate in it from any other instance. So I guess we just had a different understanding of what "exclusive" means?
As for the other question: You can just follow several similar communities on different instances right now, so if one instance gets de-federated or otherwise inaccessible you can just switch to another and so will most other people. Also, since your instance does cache remote communities, the posts in them do not disappear and are still accessible. Thus if a community decides to move they can post about that in the community and that notice will be retained on your instance for you to see later, even if the server the community was originally on disappears.
Federation should would like PeerTube instead.
Right now, federation work by a user subscribing to a community and then that community will federate to the instance.
Instead it should be instance A that "follows" instance B. Now every community on instance B is available on instance A.
If instance A is not folllowing instance B, a user can follow individual communities on instance B, but the communities would only show on the users subscription wall, not anywhere else.
I feel like users should be able to block and unblock instances at will. So let's say that instance A defederates from instance B. So instance B users cannot comment on instance A. But instance A users should be allowed to comment and interact with instance B if they choose to unblock instance B for their own personal reasons.
Is there a problem with this that I'm missing? I just feel like I should be able to choose to interact with a community if I choose, but my instance should be able to keep the other instances away if they want to.
When a server A federates with server B, it allows itself to scrape information off it and synchronise with it so that its users may comment, receive updates etc. Because these are individually run, and decentralised, each server will need to comply with its own local laws.
If server B decides to host a community with kiddie porn, Server A now will synchronise and share that information with its users, storing elements of the information on it's own servers. This would put the owner of Server A at massive risk and would be a responsibility of the admin to keep themself protected and in line with the Law. Since you can't control anything that happens on Server B.
If server B gets taken over by Russian spam bots, and they are able to comment wherever they wish, you wouldn't have any control at moderating those accounts as they are not on your server. It's easier to just block that server entirely.
Defederating but allowing commenting means that you aren't actually disconnecting, and keeping a tunnel open and swapping data and updating fresh comments.
It's a gray area as the line can become blurred with things like The Donald, which might be largely unpopular and racist but it doesn't break any laws. so deferedating willy nilly can easily become a tightrope walk between protecting users from bad actors and quelling free speech. That's why we can block those communities ourselves.
True that it's not the perfect system and as servers connect and disconnect from one another, communities may fracture and users may need to create new accounts or have multiple which can be inconvenient, but it's the most logical system for now.
There may come a time where a middle step is needed, once instances become so large that defederating can be a massive issue, it may be nice for an instance to block off communities from other instances while not actually fully defederating.
People have the tools to block users and communities. Use them, people.