It wouldn't make sense to put the onus to block every bad instance onto every single user.
Consider the extreme use case, which is obviously CSAM. I rely on my instance admins to handle that for me. If I had to painstakingly block every instance that has poor moderation (or worse), I'd simply stop using Lemmy. The "all" feed would be utterly unusable.
Also, admins need control over what's in their own database, potentially for legal reasons.
This is where I’m currently at with “not technically nsfw but I don’t want people thinking I’m like that” trying to block anime communities centered around not-technically-nude pictures.
Yeah as an instance admin sorry not sorry I defederated most anime things like that. You want that? You host it. I don't need the feds knocking down my door.
Lol wtf? The feds are going to knock down your door because of anime pics of people that aren't even nude?
The feds will knock down your door because a kid you headshotted in CoD called them. Anime is one of the more understandable reasons if we're being honest.
Honestly if the feds are going to even take the effort to move personnel to your house and knock your door, when it's quite unlikely the server is hosted physically at your house in the first place, you could take the opportunity to offer them cheap consulting on technology, international cultures (anime and stuff) and federation.
Heck, you can aim at their ego. "I tricked you, right guys? That means I'm pretty good."
An onus is a responsibility. A responsibility is power. It’s a simple fact that someone who chooses their own content source blocklists has more personal power than a person for whom someone else makes the selection.
And, it takes time and mental energy which we certainly don’t have to spare. It’s a very heavy onus that way
edge lords, tankies, paedophiles, and alt-righters should always be defederated from
defedding pedos make sense but defedding the others you mentioned are a very slippery slope into making an echo chamber
something something paradox of tolerance
Sorry, you keep saying "echo chamber" when you wanted to type "usable instance". Something seems broken with your autocorrect.
if you want an echo chamber instance that's fine.
Real life is the biggest echo chamber you'll ever find. Online is one of the most diverse spaces you'll find. That said there's nothing to be gained by humoring fascists, ML, or groups only interested in engaging in bad faith. I say this as someone who trends social libertarian and is always up for some Marxism.
I do think real life can be an echo chamber, but if you have a diverse range of people you interact with, it can be not an echo chamber at all. Having multiple friend groups, attending social events, etc can make real life more diverse.
(Ofc there's things like living in a first world country making an echo chamber of people that don't care about third world issues, but that's beside the point)
Online is also the same in my opinion.
Yes. But people not acting in good faith don't deserve my attention or time. No differing or opposing viewpoints are lost.
You act like not giving them attention is as bad as when they sent the people they disagreed with to the gas chamber or gulags by the millions.
Then yes, we want an echo chamber. Happy? You're still defending scum, no matter the semantics.
No one ever gets radicalized in these cases, hearing the same things from everyone they interact with thinking that everyone or at least most think the same way they do and they need to fix the situation while being encouraged to do so. Never happens.
Who's "we"?
could you explain how?
Step 1: Don't engage them, no room for their rhetoric.
You are to fuck off, and take your crypto and your blue line flags with you on the way out.
Do you understand my argument?
All I'm saying is that defedding from people like "tankies, alt-righters, edge lords" are fine, but because it's easy to miscategorise people into those categories (intentional or not) you could end up defederating from anyone you don't agree with, ending up in an echo chamber.
Leave
sure, you can block me if you don't agree with my opinions.
that would be kinda making an echo chamber for yourself though, so I wouldn't recommend that.
Yes. As an admin of an instance who really doesn't want child porn on my server, I'm gonna defederate the shit out of any instance that doesn't take care of such content in a reasonable time. And in my opinion, loli is child porn, so defederating there as well.
Other than that, anything that's illegal in my jurisdiction.
And the last category, spam and bigotry. Basically anything that puts too much work on my plate - if I get dozens of reports a day for users of a single instance (and I agree with the reports), I'll defederate, because no one's paying for my time.
So these are some valid reasons for me to defederate. There are probably more.
Yes.
Hell yes
Instance admins should defederate as often as they feel is necessary, and users should learn to avoid relying on instances that do it too much.
Wow! Someone who gets "choice" and "freedom of association"!
To combat spam and blatant fuckery, absolutely. Openly hateful places have no business on the general internet.
But anything else is better left to user discretion IMO.
By that standard it seems to me like most of the internet should be shut down, particularly establishment outlets that are more than happy to tell you who to hate.
Hey if you're allowed to block instances you want to block, so are instance owners. After all, it's their instance.
Instance owners are responsible for the content that is mirrored on their instance through federation, so they definitely should.
Ayy, hello there Kayn (Im just a random guy from filen discord).
Oh hi! Small world, eh?
Responsible in what way?
Legally responsible, for one.
I.E. If a federated instance hosted pedophilia, that content would be copied to, and served by, your instance's infrastructure, which is obviously legally problematic.
Yes, users shouldn't have to jump through a million hoops to get a decent feed.
This is the best part about Lemmy: if you disagree with the way an instance is run, you can setup your own and do what you want to do.
Personally I leave it up to people to block instances. The only instances I've had to block are the ones that post illegal content like CSAM.
And users don't even necessarily need to set up their own instance. There will be defed-heavy and defed-light instances users can just choose from based on personal preference. The instance mostly just matters for who federates and internal moderation policy (which is aligned), so it's not like anyone will be forced one way or another.
Just run your own server! It’s so easy! And if you’re too poor to afford your own server, just get money!
I'm sorry. Does actually having to put a bit of skin in the game offend you? You'd rather the people spending the actual money and doing the actual work just bow to your whims?
Compassionate fucking BUDDHA are the anti-defederation crowd a bunch of entitled, whiny asses!
I think that was sarcasm.
People often don't care to understand how much work it is to run a Lemmy instance. And the cost. I have my own website and the knowledge/money to start an instance, but I'm certainly not going to actually do that and monopolize the rest of my free time.
Its actually not that much work or money. I’m pretty bad when it comes to servers but i run my instance with about 50 users and pay $15 a month because i went with a more expensive host. A single user instance could spend less than $8 a month and setup isn’t hard
I thought the entire point of federated networks is that they give power to users, not to random rich people. If you want someone with a lot of money to decide what content you can see, you can go back to Twitter and Reddit.
The users of Lemmy (the software) are the instance administrators.
Ah, so it’s exactly like commercial networks then, where the true users are not those who create content, but those who want to police what other people can talk about.
Which part of "set up and run your own instance" is unclear you whiny buffoon!?
The part where you need to be rich enough to run a server.
All this is telling us is that you have no idea how much it costs or what it takes to run a server, or what a server is.
A server is just a computer that serves traffic from other computers. The rpi running pihole on my network is a server. My gaming desktop that doubles as a plex server sometimes is a server. The pfSense router managing my network is a server. The proxmox node that I have running a bunch of home utility and automation services is… you guessed it: a server.
You can find computers that are being essentially given away if you look for them online. Big companies clean out inventory all the time, and snagging old systems is not only cheap, but also helps to mitigate e-waste. It can be as cheap or as expensive as you need it to be, based on your budget and intended uses.
Sure, the computer itself is cheap, but it’s useless without having your own house where you have access to the router configuration.
I can make some educated guesses about what you intend this to mean, but why don’t you explain it more in your own words?
If you just buy a computer, you can run a Lemmy instance on it, but there will be no way to connect to it from outside your local network, making it pretty much useless. If you want it to work as an actual server, as far as I’m aware, you need to configure the router through which it’s connected to the internet to allow this.
The big difference is that with federated stuff like Lemmy you can own the actual content you create. By running your own instance, of course. Become a user. Own the data.
Yes. Instance and user defederation are best when used together.
Every instance should be able to federate and defederate from any other instance for any, all, or no reason.
Yes.
What you're describing is basically the way Twitter works, and there's a reason vulnerable folk have migrated away from it in large numbers
Twitter is not federated…
Yes, and thus you have one giant mega community in which every bigot can access anyone and everyone else. Which is what a Fediverse without instance blocks would be like
The OP is not against instance blocks.
Their question was literally "do we still need instance blocks"
What? The question was literally “Should instances defederate with other instances anymore if we can filter instances out on our end?”.
Defederating = instance block
Defederation is done by the instance administrator and affects all users. Instance blocking is done by the user and affects only them.
Instance blocks have been admin/instance level before user level instance blocks were a thing. User level instance blocks are more accurately user level filters. Only admin level instance blocks are true blocks.
Admin level blocks are what I'm referring to in this conversation and that most people assume when they see the term "instance block"
But the OP specifically talked about how the new ability to block instances can replace defederation, so it’s clear what they had in mind.
You seem to be more interested in the semantics than the point I was making
Your original point was that a fediverse without instance blocks would be bad, which is irrelevant to the post because the OP is not advocating for a fediverse without instance blocks:
The way federation works is that everything is replicated across all federated servers. If an admin team does not want to have to moderate specific kinds of content or users who are deemed detrimental (but not necessarily illegal) they have the ability and right to defederate.
Also, I've blocked servers but it doesn't block users. Defederation does though.
Just give me the tools, as a user, to block instances. Not just the way it is done recently but truly block an instance and all it's posts and users. I want to be able to black hole an entire instance and all things related to it.
I want to block Threads in this way. Nuclear option, I want nothing to do with it.
Connect does that, it's glorious.
The feature only lets you filter posts, not users from that instance.
When you block the instance, it's only visible on your client. The fact that they still are federated and content from them is mirrored on your local instance stays unchanged. So they still should defederate with such instances.
So defederating is only useful as a way to save storage space?
Yeah, pretty much.
I think still yes, when a problem is abundantly clear, but borderline cases can more easily be left to individual preference.
Yes. I think it's especially important for attracting (or perhaps more accurately, maintaining) new users to the fediverse.
It's one of the main differentiators between instances. If you want no filters, you can make your own instance or see if you can find one with a "zero defederation" policy.
E.g. if you don't want to see a bunch of political propaganda or CSAM, and are into programming, programming.dev comes "pre configured" for that. Likewise lemmy.world, blahaj, etc... comes with their own flavour and configuration.
Yes, because you don't want to provide them your content for free, so they can continue building engagement on your behalf.
Btw, was feddit.ch somehow defederated?
Yes, because end-user blocking only blocks posts from an instance, not its toxic users or their comments.
Defederation should always be an extreme measure. Usually it's just the self-righteousness instinct trying to performatively obstruct other people. I usually find these discussions repulsive because of how people speak about each other (bitching about "tankies" or whatever and demanding that they be ideologically cleansed).
If we have more power to curate our own feeds, then there should be less defederation.
Usually it’s just the self-righteousness instinct…
I love¹ telepathic people who can read other people's minds and post on their behalf.
¹ This is sarcasm. I hate the delusional who think they're telepaths.
Enjoy your feelings of hatred then, I guess. Don't worry though, defederation will win and you'll be safe inside your silo bitching about how there were once people who said things you disagreed with whom you hated and continue to hate, and that hate is all you ever communicate.
Yeah this is kind of where I was coming from with my question
Yes, but users should be able to manually whitelist defederated instances so they can interact with such an instance, if they want to. Lemmygrad shouldn't be visible by default, but if you really like communist tankie shit, you should be able to manually allow it I guess.
Replace "communist tankie shit" with "CSAM" or "torture porn" or such and see if that makes any sense to you (keeping in mind that all content from your "whitelisted" stuff is stored on the server owner's hardware).
Ok, you're right, I didn't think about that. Let's just say that federation/defederation is a tricky question.
Seems pretty simple. If you want to be able to see the content on an instance that everyone else has defederated from, create an account on that instance as well. Apps allow for pretty seamless usage of multiple accounts. That's the easy alternative to the constant "make your own instance and run it yourself response"
What’s the point of federation if you need to make multiple accounts anyway?
Federation isn't the same as "practically the same server". That's just Twitter or Reddit you're describing then, a single fully unified pot of information that is still spread out over a vast amount of individual servers for only for parallelization and redundancy reasons.
Federated applications like Lemmy are, as the name implies, federated. Not merged or unified or so.
E-mail is also a federated protocol. Imagine if every time you wanted to send an e-mail, you had to check whether your provider likes the recipient’s provider and if not, create an account at the recipient’s provider (if that’s even possible).
Oh you mean like that thing email servers do when they block other email servers. Yeah imagine that. That'd be wild! 😂
Yeah, I know that and how the same people who support defederation love to complain about Gmail and Outlook blocking their home server.
Exactly
The main point of federation for me is access to more content without it being run by large corporations. If an instance gets taken over by a toxic group that is bot spamming advertisements or such I can move to another instance and the community lives on without having to find a whole new platform.
I think self hosting is easier than messing around with multiple accounts on different instances
That's called setting up your own instance and running it how you want to
Kinda agree, but chances are high that instances like Beehaw will be unwilling to federate with you
So it's freedom of association you're opposed to then?
But isn't that their own choice then, too?
I mean, why should they have their freedom restricted?
The way activity pub works is that a user subscribes to something and then the content gets copied to your server. If you allow a user to subscribe to whatever they want, then you're just going to get illegal content stored on your server.
I'll probably get downvoted for saying this, but in general I think defederation is against the free software ethos.
Free software is supposed to be about giving control back to the user, not the BOFH that happens to run the server they are using.
There's obviously going to be exceptions for illegal content, or actively trying to disrupt the lemmy network (by DDOS, flooding, etc) but I feel that's where the line should be drawn.
By "BOFH that happens to run the server" you mean "the volunteer whose money, time, and effort are being expended on your behalf", right?
This is the single most entitled opinion I've ever heard in this. "I, the person who bears none of the pecuniary, temporal, or psychological costs of running the server insist that 'the free software ethos' means I get what I want on someone else's computer."
Fuck that noise.
If you want a server run your way that federates with the people you want to federate with, put your own skin in the game. Run your own server with your own rules. THAT is the actual free software ethos: DIY if you don't like the way someone else does it.
The free software ethos is the punk ethos, not the hippy dippy shits ethos.
does bigotry count
Free software is supposed to be about giving control back to the user, not the BOFH that happens to run the server they are using.
But the user of the free software has all the controls? How is Lemmy (as an example) not maximum free software?
the user of the free software in this case would be the server owner.
Yes, this is still necessary.
It wouldn't make sense to put the onus to block every bad instance onto every single user.
Consider the extreme use case, which is obviously CSAM. I rely on my instance admins to handle that for me. If I had to painstakingly block every instance that has poor moderation (or worse), I'd simply stop using Lemmy. The "all" feed would be utterly unusable.
Also, admins need control over what's in their own database, potentially for legal reasons.
This is where I’m currently at with “not technically nsfw but I don’t want people thinking I’m like that” trying to block anime communities centered around not-technically-nude pictures.
Yeah as an instance admin sorry not sorry I defederated most anime things like that. You want that? You host it. I don't need the feds knocking down my door.
Lol wtf? The feds are going to knock down your door because of anime pics of people that aren't even nude?
The feds will knock down your door because a kid you headshotted in CoD called them. Anime is one of the more understandable reasons if we're being honest.
Honestly if the feds are going to even take the effort to move personnel to your house and knock your door, when it's quite unlikely the server is hosted physically at your house in the first place, you could take the opportunity to offer them cheap consulting on technology, international cultures (anime and stuff) and federation.
Heck, you can aim at their ego. "I tricked you, right guys? That means I'm pretty good."
An onus is a responsibility. A responsibility is power. It’s a simple fact that someone who chooses their own content source blocklists has more personal power than a person for whom someone else makes the selection.
And, it takes time and mental energy which we certainly don’t have to spare. It’s a very heavy onus that way
edge lords, tankies, paedophiles, and alt-righters should always be defederated from
defedding pedos make sense but defedding the others you mentioned are a very slippery slope into making an echo chamber
something something paradox of tolerance
Sorry, you keep saying "echo chamber" when you wanted to type "usable instance". Something seems broken with your autocorrect.
if you want an echo chamber instance that's fine.
Real life is the biggest echo chamber you'll ever find. Online is one of the most diverse spaces you'll find. That said there's nothing to be gained by humoring fascists, ML, or groups only interested in engaging in bad faith. I say this as someone who trends social libertarian and is always up for some Marxism.
I do think real life can be an echo chamber, but if you have a diverse range of people you interact with, it can be not an echo chamber at all. Having multiple friend groups, attending social events, etc can make real life more diverse.
(Ofc there's things like living in a first world country making an echo chamber of people that don't care about third world issues, but that's beside the point)
Online is also the same in my opinion.
Yes. But people not acting in good faith don't deserve my attention or time. No differing or opposing viewpoints are lost.
You act like not giving them attention is as bad as when they sent the people they disagreed with to the gas chamber or gulags by the millions.
Then yes, we want an echo chamber. Happy? You're still defending scum, no matter the semantics.
No one ever gets radicalized in these cases, hearing the same things from everyone they interact with thinking that everyone or at least most think the same way they do and they need to fix the situation while being encouraged to do so. Never happens.
Who's "we"?
could you explain how?
Step 1: Don't engage them, no room for their rhetoric.
You are to fuck off, and take your crypto and your blue line flags with you on the way out.
Do you understand my argument?
All I'm saying is that defedding from people like "tankies, alt-righters, edge lords" are fine, but because it's easy to miscategorise people into those categories (intentional or not) you could end up defederating from anyone you don't agree with, ending up in an echo chamber.
Leave
sure, you can block me if you don't agree with my opinions.
that would be kinda making an echo chamber for yourself though, so I wouldn't recommend that.
Yes. As an admin of an instance who really doesn't want child porn on my server, I'm gonna defederate the shit out of any instance that doesn't take care of such content in a reasonable time. And in my opinion, loli is child porn, so defederating there as well.
Other than that, anything that's illegal in my jurisdiction.
And the last category, spam and bigotry. Basically anything that puts too much work on my plate - if I get dozens of reports a day for users of a single instance (and I agree with the reports), I'll defederate, because no one's paying for my time.
So these are some valid reasons for me to defederate. There are probably more.
Yes.
Hell yes
Instance admins should defederate as often as they feel is necessary, and users should learn to avoid relying on instances that do it too much.
Wow! Someone who gets "choice" and "freedom of association"!
To combat spam and blatant fuckery, absolutely. Openly hateful places have no business on the general internet.
But anything else is better left to user discretion IMO.
By that standard it seems to me like most of the internet should be shut down, particularly establishment outlets that are more than happy to tell you who to hate.
Hey if you're allowed to block instances you want to block, so are instance owners. After all, it's their instance.
Instance owners are responsible for the content that is mirrored on their instance through federation, so they definitely should.
Ayy, hello there Kayn (Im just a random guy from filen discord).
Oh hi! Small world, eh?
Responsible in what way?
Legally responsible, for one.
I.E. If a federated instance hosted pedophilia, that content would be copied to, and served by, your instance's infrastructure, which is obviously legally problematic.
Yes, users shouldn't have to jump through a million hoops to get a decent feed.
This is the best part about Lemmy: if you disagree with the way an instance is run, you can setup your own and do what you want to do.
Personally I leave it up to people to block instances. The only instances I've had to block are the ones that post illegal content like CSAM.
And users don't even necessarily need to set up their own instance. There will be defed-heavy and defed-light instances users can just choose from based on personal preference. The instance mostly just matters for who federates and internal moderation policy (which is aligned), so it's not like anyone will be forced one way or another.
Just run your own server! It’s so easy! And if you’re too poor to afford your own server, just get money!
I'm sorry. Does actually having to put a bit of skin in the game offend you? You'd rather the people spending the actual money and doing the actual work just bow to your whims?
Compassionate fucking BUDDHA are the anti-defederation crowd a bunch of entitled, whiny asses!
I think that was sarcasm.
People often don't care to understand how much work it is to run a Lemmy instance. And the cost. I have my own website and the knowledge/money to start an instance, but I'm certainly not going to actually do that and monopolize the rest of my free time.
Its actually not that much work or money. I’m pretty bad when it comes to servers but i run my instance with about 50 users and pay $15 a month because i went with a more expensive host. A single user instance could spend less than $8 a month and setup isn’t hard
I thought the entire point of federated networks is that they give power to users, not to random rich people. If you want someone with a lot of money to decide what content you can see, you can go back to Twitter and Reddit.
The users of Lemmy (the software) are the instance administrators.
Ah, so it’s exactly like commercial networks then, where the true users are not those who create content, but those who want to police what other people can talk about.
Which part of "set up and run your own instance" is unclear you whiny buffoon!?
The part where you need to be rich enough to run a server.
All this is telling us is that you have no idea how much it costs or what it takes to run a server, or what a server is.
A server is just a computer that serves traffic from other computers. The rpi running pihole on my network is a server. My gaming desktop that doubles as a plex server sometimes is a server. The pfSense router managing my network is a server. The proxmox node that I have running a bunch of home utility and automation services is… you guessed it: a server.
You can find computers that are being essentially given away if you look for them online. Big companies clean out inventory all the time, and snagging old systems is not only cheap, but also helps to mitigate e-waste. It can be as cheap or as expensive as you need it to be, based on your budget and intended uses.
Sure, the computer itself is cheap, but it’s useless without having your own house where you have access to the router configuration.
I can make some educated guesses about what you intend this to mean, but why don’t you explain it more in your own words?
If you just buy a computer, you can run a Lemmy instance on it, but there will be no way to connect to it from outside your local network, making it pretty much useless. If you want it to work as an actual server, as far as I’m aware, you need to configure the router through which it’s connected to the internet to allow this.
No not at all.
The big difference is that with federated stuff like Lemmy you can own the actual content you create. By running your own instance, of course. Become a user. Own the data.
Yes. Instance and user defederation are best when used together.
Every instance should be able to federate and defederate from any other instance for any, all, or no reason.
Yes.
What you're describing is basically the way Twitter works, and there's a reason vulnerable folk have migrated away from it in large numbers
Twitter is not federated…
Yes, and thus you have one giant mega community in which every bigot can access anyone and everyone else. Which is what a Fediverse without instance blocks would be like
The OP is not against instance blocks.
Their question was literally "do we still need instance blocks"
What? The question was literally “Should instances defederate with other instances anymore if we can filter instances out on our end?”.
Defederating = instance block
Defederation is done by the instance administrator and affects all users. Instance blocking is done by the user and affects only them.
Instance blocks have been admin/instance level before user level instance blocks were a thing. User level instance blocks are more accurately user level filters. Only admin level instance blocks are true blocks.
Admin level blocks are what I'm referring to in this conversation and that most people assume when they see the term "instance block"
But the OP specifically talked about how the new ability to block instances can replace defederation, so it’s clear what they had in mind.
You seem to be more interested in the semantics than the point I was making
Your original point was that a fediverse without instance blocks would be bad, which is irrelevant to the post because the OP is not advocating for a fediverse without instance blocks:
.... the point. Not even going to bother repeating the image.
The way federation works is that everything is replicated across all federated servers. If an admin team does not want to have to moderate specific kinds of content or users who are deemed detrimental (but not necessarily illegal) they have the ability and right to defederate.
Also, I've blocked servers but it doesn't block users. Defederation does though.
Just give me the tools, as a user, to block instances. Not just the way it is done recently but truly block an instance and all it's posts and users. I want to be able to black hole an entire instance and all things related to it.
I want to block Threads in this way. Nuclear option, I want nothing to do with it.
Connect does that, it's glorious.
The feature only lets you filter posts, not users from that instance.
When you block the instance, it's only visible on your client. The fact that they still are federated and content from them is mirrored on your local instance stays unchanged. So they still should defederate with such instances.
So defederating is only useful as a way to save storage space?
Yeah, pretty much.
I think still yes, when a problem is abundantly clear, but borderline cases can more easily be left to individual preference.
@qooqie@lemmy.world yes.
Yes. I think it's especially important for attracting (or perhaps more accurately, maintaining) new users to the fediverse.
It's one of the main differentiators between instances. If you want no filters, you can make your own instance or see if you can find one with a "zero defederation" policy.
E.g. if you don't want to see a bunch of political propaganda or CSAM, and are into programming, programming.dev comes "pre configured" for that. Likewise lemmy.world, blahaj, etc... comes with their own flavour and configuration.
Yes, because you don't want to provide them your content for free, so they can continue building engagement on your behalf.
Btw, was feddit.ch somehow defederated?
Yes, because end-user blocking only blocks posts from an instance, not its toxic users or their comments.
Defederation should always be an extreme measure. Usually it's just the self-righteousness instinct trying to performatively obstruct other people. I usually find these discussions repulsive because of how people speak about each other (bitching about "tankies" or whatever and demanding that they be ideologically cleansed).
If we have more power to curate our own feeds, then there should be less defederation.
I love¹ telepathic people who can read other people's minds and post on their behalf.
¹ This is sarcasm. I hate the delusional who think they're telepaths.
Enjoy your feelings of hatred then, I guess. Don't worry though, defederation will win and you'll be safe inside your silo bitching about how there were once people who said things you disagreed with whom you hated and continue to hate, and that hate is all you ever communicate.
Yeah this is kind of where I was coming from with my question
Yes, but users should be able to manually whitelist defederated instances so they can interact with such an instance, if they want to. Lemmygrad shouldn't be visible by default, but if you really like communist tankie shit, you should be able to manually allow it I guess.
Replace "communist tankie shit" with "CSAM" or "torture porn" or such and see if that makes any sense to you (keeping in mind that all content from your "whitelisted" stuff is stored on the server owner's hardware).
Ok, you're right, I didn't think about that. Let's just say that federation/defederation is a tricky question.
Seems pretty simple. If you want to be able to see the content on an instance that everyone else has defederated from, create an account on that instance as well. Apps allow for pretty seamless usage of multiple accounts. That's the easy alternative to the constant "make your own instance and run it yourself response"
What’s the point of federation if you need to make multiple accounts anyway?
Federation isn't the same as "practically the same server". That's just Twitter or Reddit you're describing then, a single fully unified pot of information that is still spread out over a vast amount of individual servers for only for parallelization and redundancy reasons.
Federated applications like Lemmy are, as the name implies, federated. Not merged or unified or so.
E-mail is also a federated protocol. Imagine if every time you wanted to send an e-mail, you had to check whether your provider likes the recipient’s provider and if not, create an account at the recipient’s provider (if that’s even possible).
Oh you mean like that thing email servers do when they block other email servers. Yeah imagine that. That'd be wild! 😂
Yeah, I know that and how the same people who support defederation love to complain about Gmail and Outlook blocking their home server.
Exactly
The main point of federation for me is access to more content without it being run by large corporations. If an instance gets taken over by a toxic group that is bot spamming advertisements or such I can move to another instance and the community lives on without having to find a whole new platform.
I think self hosting is easier than messing around with multiple accounts on different instances
That's called setting up your own instance and running it how you want to
Kinda agree, but chances are high that instances like Beehaw will be unwilling to federate with you
So it's freedom of association you're opposed to then?
But isn't that their own choice then, too?
I mean, why should they have their freedom restricted?
The way activity pub works is that a user subscribes to something and then the content gets copied to your server. If you allow a user to subscribe to whatever they want, then you're just going to get illegal content stored on your server.
I'll probably get downvoted for saying this, but in general I think defederation is against the free software ethos.
Free software is supposed to be about giving control back to the user, not the BOFH that happens to run the server they are using.
There's obviously going to be exceptions for illegal content, or actively trying to disrupt the lemmy network (by DDOS, flooding, etc) but I feel that's where the line should be drawn.
By "BOFH that happens to run the server" you mean "the volunteer whose money, time, and effort are being expended on your behalf", right?
This is the single most entitled opinion I've ever heard in this. "I, the person who bears none of the pecuniary, temporal, or psychological costs of running the server insist that 'the free software ethos' means I get what I want on someone else's computer."
Fuck that noise.
If you want a server run your way that federates with the people you want to federate with, put your own skin in the game. Run your own server with your own rules. THAT is the actual free software ethos: DIY if you don't like the way someone else does it.
The free software ethos is the punk ethos, not the hippy dippy shits ethos.
does bigotry count
But the user of the free software has all the controls? How is Lemmy (as an example) not maximum free software?
the user of the free software in this case would be the server owner.