I don't know that a formal charter is required, but I do think that it is important that all instance admins do a couple of things:

• Develop and publish a moderation policy in some form

• Determine and publish criteria by which they decide when to defederate from another instance

There isn't one right answer for either of those things, and the point isn't to ensure everybody passes a purity test. It's to set expectations for users on the instance, users on other instances who may participate in communities on the instance, and other instance admins.

Well-thought-out policies will be copied and forked by other new instances, and that will create consensus communities of instances that are at least on the same page when it comes to how a site is supposed to work.

It will also be helpful for the community to be able to talk about things like what instances have a lot of bad actors or poor moderation, something similar to #fediblock on Mastodon. The issues that mods face and that individuals targeted for harassment face are often invisible to the average joe user, and can also be invisible to admins if they aren't actively encountering reports themselves. #fediblock creates a place -- sometimes fractious, yes -- where folks can ensure that those issues are visible and give admins an opportunity to determine whether or not they need to take action.

So, the issue with Mastodon is that there's no global search and discovery. In order to be found, things have to be hashtagged. The problem with hashtagging is that twitter clout weirdos made hashtagging SO uncool that nobody, anywhere, wants to do it anymore. So, do search hashtags related to your interests and follow folks that are posting to them, but that may not get you too many hits.

If you're on an instance that isn't enormous, try the local timeline to identify some folks to follow. On big instances, that's not usually useful because it's too big a firehose.

For art specifically maybe see the stuff that curator on mastodon.art boosts: https://mastodon.art/@Curator

This is why Lemmy/Kbin is potentially cooler for some applications than Mastodon. Since communities are (a) not stigmitized like tags and (b) also mandatory, plus search exists, it's much easier to find things! (Although there's not yet much to be found)

Audio gear with non-replaceable batteries bothers me so much

Firefox, but make it wet

(I don't know if it's a worse than "calckey" tbf)

We need the Lemmy equivalent of fediblock so we can post this for everyone to defederate

It's going to be incredibly necessary in the long run. Decentralized means some proportion of important communities are going to be on servers that will eventually be shut down for various reasons. Not everybody who's running an instance now will run it forever, but there may be communities with important conversations that folks will want to preserve.

Mastodon has account migration and Lemmy community migration should work similarly.

https://mas.else.social/@choyer/110746384528095273

Someone checked and there's already an existing trademark for Firefish in software specifically, at least in Europe. Apparently they make HR solutions of some sort.

https://jobs.firefishsoftware.com/about-us/meet-the-team.aspx

For example, did you know a release of a new fully open source LLM called OpenLLaMA just got announced by the Researchers at Berkeley AI Research?

Lol, a lot of my friends experience all LLM news as doomscrolling basically because of how those tools are being used, to whose profit and at whose expense.

Not trying to pick a fight about that here, just that it's funny how relative "doom" is.

Anywho it would be entirely reasonable to create a community dedicated to good technology news however you define it. Reality itself is pretty dark these days so any given cross-section of it is going to contain a lot of doom by default.

I posted a medium-short summary elsewhere with a couple of links for folks looking for slightly more context.

I don't think the eris or defederation things are Huge News in themselves, but if it's true he doctored a screenshot to make the .art admin look bad, that's not a good look for a lead deve/flagship instance admin.

.art is an influential leader in community safety/moderation standards in the fediverse; their standards for federation are moderately high, and probably higher than folks on many lemmy instances would likely agree with. But it feels like the firefish guy has possibly a pattern of not doing his homework about things in general?

Obviously the big question is, did he actually doctor screenshots and if so, WTF, man.

There are many different visions for "success" of decentralized projects, some of which require/imply explosive growth and some do not. There are also some goals, such as diversity and inclusivity, which can have complicated relationships with the concept of "growth."

I want all kinds of people (that are NOT BIGOTS) to be join the fediverse, participate safely and form their own communities[^1].

To achieve this, it's beneficial for it to be easy for folks to join the fediverse at all, e.g., being able to easily find an instance and sign up for an account and not worry about the infrastructure or instance politics, and critically to be able to easily find one another and interact. These are also features that just fuel userbase growth generally.

But to sustain it, it's necessary to have strong moderation (which in turn requires a manageable workload for mods) and to keep large pools of bad actors in check. It's also important on a safety basis for many users to be less discoverable because high discoverability of marginalized users results in high rates of harassment by bigots. These are features that support a better and safer experience for people who are in the fediverse.

These things are directly in tension, which makes it very difficult to have a healthy fediverse. The result on Mastodon has been a bifurcation of "successful" (by different definitions) instances into, on the one hand, very large but poorly moderated instances with garbage fire local timelines but lots of people and lots of content to interact with, and, on the other hand, smaller, well moderated instances that flourish internally but can be hard to join or to interact with if you're on one of the large instances.

Both models exert exclusionary forces in their own ways. If you keep everyone in your federation, and that includes nazis, then you are de facto participating in driving people who are targeted by nazis off of the network. But if your happy little closed instances are impossible to join and has a constraining monoculture, then a lot of other nice folks may get left out.

There's not an easy solution to this. The situation for lemmy will be similar in some ways and different in others. The piece that worries me particularly is that instance politics questions become potentially more charged due to the fact that instances are hosting the communities[^2] and not just the users, plus there's not yet a way to migrate communities.

[^1]: in the sense of social connections generally, not just "community" as a lemmy feature [^2]: In the lemmy feature sense

Defederation is an important tool and is part of what makes the fediverse work. In my experience, people who are strongly defederation averse are mostly either quite new to the fediverse or have the relative privilege of never having to really deal with bad actors especially en masse.

No disrespect to the blahaj admins at all (I'm on lemmy.blahaj.zone rigth now!) but safe spaces for queer folks aren't automatically safe spaces for non-white folks and there's a lot of historical pain and drama about that on the fediverse

New signups have been crashing Cohost for much of this morning, and it looks like a lot of folks are seeing new Mastodon users as well

Unsurprisingly given its extremely high profile as a purveyor of transphobic coverage, many mastodon instances have greeted them with a firm block. (If this confuses folks who don't pay attention to this sort of thing, just picture in your head if it was fox news.)

I'm not on lemmy.world, but I've joined some communities that are. I think an important question is, for any community mods who take this stance, do you plan to shutter your lemmy.world community and move to another?

This situation is one reason why it's important to get tools for community migration into Lemmy. (Another is: what if an admin simply has to shut down their instance for personal reasons?)

(Also FWIW there's already reason to defederate based on the garbage moderation even if you're not concerned about EEE, so I don't get admins who are in "wait and see" mode.)

This has already been happening with Mastodon for years. It creates a need for instance admins to stay on top of defederating from those instances, and from instances that refuse to defederate from those instances. It doesn't particularly impact public perception of Mastodon overall.

The question is, if there are instances that are full of transphobic content, and they're reported, does firefish defederate them. If they do, the view will improve. Although, global feeds are never very useful.

That’s not what gatekeeping means.

Welcome to the fediverse! Instance admins are under obligation to federate with every other instance possible, and are also under no obligation to do everything in their power to recapture the reddit experience.

Who browses the local timeline on a large fediverse instance lol.

Anyway, reality is bad and we're living in it, so I have relatively little patience for people who complain about doomposting. There's a lot of doom out there.

If folks want to only see good news, start an "only good news" community (assuming this doesn't already exist) and just stick to your subscribed communities view.

OP: lemmy.ml is down Reply: You should post about this on lemmy.ml instead

I've also observed this issue with stuff on lemmy.ml not making it over, I assume because the servers are just too slammed. It's not exclusive to lemmy.world. (Although it does seem to be the worst with lemmy.world.)

They serve vastly different purposes. Lemmy would be a terrible place for people to chat about how their days are going, which is a key part of what microblogging platforms provide to be honest. And conversely, for structured conversations focused on specific topics, Lemmy has obvious advantages.

Beyond the basic structure, there are cultural issues with both that make them a bit tenuous for me.

The iceshrimp fork actually came before the thing with .art broke and seemingly had to do with issues internal to the calckey development community. It's hard to say for sure what the situation was because most of the stuff on both sides was pretty vaguely stated.

Some folks won't be able to access some communities due to defederation, and in other cases folks may want to start a community on their home instance for certain reasons. This isn't the end of the world; probably in the long run either everybody will centralize on the biggest one, or you'll end up with one or two alternatives that have a bit different culture or focus.

That being said, if you like to read comments, it can get confusing when a bunch of different communities all have high interaction posts about the same topic at the same time.

I guess we'll have to escape to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism

Qobuz and Tidal are less evil than Spotify and support higher quality audio, but also have smaller selections. Where practical I'll buy albums I like on FLAC from Bandcamp or HDtracks but it is also nice to have a streaming service for discovering new stuff.

The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you. defederate

The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don't have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.

One of the things that's very funny to me is when free speech absolutists confidently assert that defederation, a standard practice and indispensable tool of the fediverse, is inherently tragic and destructive, and that people who don't want to be in federation with the worst people and entities imaginable should leave and start their own protocol. (It would actually make more sense for those folks to leave and start their own platform where it's impossible to defederate.)

Is there a lemmy/kbin equivalent of #fediblock on mastodon? E.g., a community or something where folks from across the fediverse share instances that should be considered for defederation? I've seen plenty of internal defederation discourse on individual instances, but generally in isolation.

I have no desire to see facebook in the fediverse, but that's not really gentrification, it's more like Walmart. (Anti-competitive corporate monopoly suppressing competition and forcing everyone to serve their bottom line)

Gentrification refers to the displacement of poor and working class people, and especially people of color, by affluent people, especially white. That's not the specific dynamic here, in no small part because Mastodon has been self-gentrifying[^1] aggressively from the beginning. (It is jokingly referred to as the HOA of the internet)

[^1]: Through white techies being constantly obnoxious to POC who have the temerity to try to join the fediverse, the particular culture of content warning policing, and lack of discoverability making it hard to form community. Note: there's no reason to think facebook would improve any of this.

I don't know whether fail is the right word per se, and it's certainly also too soon to say that the reddit migration has succeeded.

I think that are some challenges that are inherent to federated models, and I do also think there are challenges that mastodon has that lemmy/kbin can potentially avoid

Common challenges

• How federation works is confusing to the average non-technical user. This increases the barrier to entry
• There is an inherent tension between instance best practices (keeping the size manageable, having proactive moderation, not federating with nazis) and rapidly scaling federated networks to much larger numbers of users. Thus even in the best case scenario, onboarding a mass "migration" is hard to do well

Key differences between mastodon and lemmy/kbin

• Mastodon is basically hostile to search and discoverability. This is an important feature for most of the people who really enjoy using Mastodon, but it's a huge downside for a lot of folks who thrived on twitter. But Lemmy has search! Kind of janky, but it's there.
• It's hard to get people to use tags. Twitter clout weirdos simply made tags too uncool for most people to willingly use them anymore. And what little discoverability there is on mastodon relies on tags. Lemmy doesn't have this problem because communities/subreddits never acquired the stigma that tags have.

Cultural stuff which is very tbd on here

• Mastodon has a huge problem with passive aggressive white techies and their micro- and macro-aggressions against people of color, which has flared up repeatedly and made it harder for key communities to flourish on Mastodon. Unclear how this kind of thing is going to play out on lemmy. Seems at a glance like there are fewer passive aggressive liberals but way more outright edgelords.
• There's a large cleavage between two different conceptions of how federation and defederation should work, which in Mastodon has resulted in people being split between a few huge, poorly moderated mainstream instances that are kind of tedious to be on, and many small curated instances that are pleasant to be on but have complex siloed defederation politics, and also the nazi/spammer gab cesspool.
• Mastodon has apolitical techbro development but a huge lefty userbase; lemmy has hard-left development but a huge apolitical techbro userbase. (This is extremely funny to me.)

As others have said, nothing.

Mastodon has a sort of lightweight verification which just signifies that you are to some degree in control of the URLs linked to in your profile. So for example, if you have your own domain or something that people associate with you, then you can use that in your profile to show that it's you. Of course, that depends on that domain meaning something to the end user, and the end user being savvy enough to, for example, know that someone could get the .com version of your .net domain, etc. etc.

You're posting to the beehaw tech news community ("magazine") though.

I think the place for kbin feature requests is: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues

I assume OP was using an unmodified camera. The hot mirrors (IR blocking filters) built into modern cameras are extremely efficient, so it takes a lot of exposure to get an image past them.

There wouldn't be an empty spot, your instance would never know that comment was there to begin with. You would be able to see it if you clicked through to the other instance of course.

Ah, sorry, I misunderstood. Could probably find some examples live examples by looking at any convo with folks from beehaw and lemmy.world or shitjustworks, and viewing that thread from the different instances

I don't have any philosophical objection for paying to use a platform I enjoy, but in the case of youtube, they have been so deliberately detrimental to society in terms of platforming fascists that I feel bad about the prospect of paying them, even if much of the money is going to creators I do like who I'm actually watching

BTW, you can force the server to see a comment by searching for the URL of that content, but this obviously only works if you know the comment exists. I don't think there's a user-side way to trigger the server to look for contents en masse. Not sure if it's something that the instance admin can configure.

Indeed, that is not gatekeeping. It's applying social and moral pressure. Similar to a boycott campaign, protest, etc. Such methods are intended to discomfit and inconvenience. They're used in situations where being nice and getting along are determined to be nonviable strategies for getting the desired result.

Those methods in themselves are morally neutral; the question is, are they employed for a reason which justifies and necessitates them, i.e., how serious is a thread does Facebook pose to the fediverse. (I think it's reasonable to take facebook as an evil seriously and to not give them an inch.)

Some people are very entrenched in their opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see posts with “We must defederate from everyone who federates with Meta”.

That's definitely already happening. This is a normal part of federation, tbh. Instances block instances that federate with bad actors because they want to limit as much as possible their exposure to/involvement with those actors, as well as to place pressure on others to do the same. Obviously not everyone considers facebook to be a bad actor, but it's not surprising that those who do would act accordingly.