Hi all, I’m a Lemmy FOSS app contributor that’s made a couple of tools for people starting small instances including Lemmy Community Seeder (LCS) for building content on new server’s All Feeds and Lemmy Post Purger (LPP) for clearing old posts on smaller instances.
Today I’m releasing Lemmy Defederation Sync (LDS). When launching a new Lemmy instance, administrators may not understand the necessity of defederation with problem instances. Using LDS, you can sync your instance’s “blocked instance” list with that of another server(s) whose admins you trust.
This is the kind of project that hurts Lemmy as whole. Defederation leads to fragmentation making Lemmy less likely to be a replacement for Reddit.
I disagree that defederation hurts Lemmy. It doesn’t hurt it anymore than normal moderation hurt Lemmy. Users on defederated instances are more than able to create an account on a non problematic instance and follow the rules there.
Defederation is essentially Lemmy’s version of quarantining subs on Reddit. And nobody except maybe extremists thought quarantine was a bad idea
You forgot people who selfhost single user instances. So they would have to destroy the old instance and create and new one with a new domain, which is a lot of work and resources.
Edit: Please also notice the problem here is not defederation itself, but shared lists of defederation. Because most likely the list is super long and nobody would check if all instances are legitimately blocked.
If the single user on such an instance is so obnoxious as to be defederated from multiple larger instances, making them spend time and money to come back is a good thing.
If he actually is obnoxious, then yes. But what guaranties he is obnoxious? Or that he just statements were just misinterpreted. Happens a lot.
If you trust the judgment of the (admins of the) sites you are syncing with, this isn’t a problem. If you don’t trust that, don’t sync with them.
For instance, if I wanted to run my own server, I would absolutely sync with lemmy.world’s block list. I agree with their stated defederation policy, and have seen no evidence of the admins disregarding it.
Perhaps you are misunderstanding what this tool does?
I am making an analogy of current situation of mastodon landscape where similar a project is based on questionable sources. Currently beehaw is nice and is blocking Lemmy.world. This makes me believe beehaw then end up blocking Lemmy world.
What could a single user instance possibly do to be defederated on a massive scale? And at that point, why not simply join another instance?
A single admin on a larger instance could get a stick up his ass and defederate a smaller instance, which would then propagate to everyone else copying that ban list. Power tripping admins didn’t die with Reddit.
that’s exactly where shared blocklist are a problem, if for some reason or another someone’s instance get mistakingly defederated, which is far form unlikely in one the enormous instances that have to manage federation of hundreds of instances, then all of a sudden, that big instance everyone trust get their blocklist copied all over the verse and poor jane is blocked from everything and has no idea why
They could have done nothing, but because someone on a so called trusted source de-federated it because he did not like him, de-federation would accumulate.
Actually beehaw is a nice instance and is blocking lemmy.world, which too is fantastic. Thus sharing beehaw’s de-federation list would cut out lemmy.world from a huge audience. In this particulare case, I wonder what lemmy.world did wrong to be worth de-federating from.
So you see, sharing huge block lists would wrongfully cut out people. Since nobody would investigate the whole list because doing so would take weeks.
Joining another instance is out of the question for many because they are firm belivers of self-hosting and decentralization. Two principles that are pillars of the the fediverse.
This tool isn’t a shared master list like ad blockers use, it’s me spinning up my own instance and deciding I want to match my blocklist to lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or whoever, specifically. And who I sync from is a decision I make about who I trust etc. I can unmake it and switch my sync to another instance the moment I hear about something I disagree with.
You get a point. This changes a lot of things. I need to review again the project page. I first understood that this is a shared block list. If it is just a mirroring of a given instance, then it is not the same.
This tool is kind of for those single user instances tho and while something like this could hurt Lemmy that’s only the case if it’s used wrong, I doubt big instances will start to share block lists because they have the resources to gather them manually!
I will exagerate and ask you: are you discriminating between bigger and smaller instances? While smaller instances are definitely small, together they are big enough.
Tf? I just say that it’s probably mostly single user and small instances that will want something like that because they don’t have the moderation caipabilities and might trust the admins of a big instance, not sure what your sentence is supposed to mean tho so could you explain?
The problem is that Reddit has a massive user-base and profits from the FOMO on newcomers while Lemmy is a very small thing most people don’t know about and there are multiple cases of instances defederating others just because they feel like it… like the BS that beehaw.org pulled. Now we’ve lemmy.world and beehaw.org two of the largest instances that don’t talk to each other.
This is when degeneration is used with sanity. However, people just use that feature to cancel people they don’t like. And this hurts smaller instances a lot.
Beehaw came out the gate saying this is how they’d operate. They were always aiming to be strictly moderated and only federate with strictly moderated and anti-hateful places.
It’s not a fault that they’re operating exactly as advertised and promoted.
Defederation does hurt Lemmy when overdone, but sometimes it simply needs to happen to keep unmoderated instances from harassing your instance. Shared blocklists when properly managed simplify this process and improves Lemmy’s capability to protect it’s users from spam and brigading.
That assumes defederation only happens in those cases. You have an account from lemmy.world, so I guess you trust that instance. You know, the same instance that preemptively defederated from hexbear.net for political reasons. You see the problem?
No. I just looked at that instance’s front page. If the lemmy.world admins didn’t take action, I don’t see how I could continue to trust their judgement in enforcing their code of conduct going forward.
Seeing the number of down votes I may say that most people do not take smaller or single instance users that are too common. They are the ones that get most hurt with shared defederation lists. This only encourages people to gather to well known instance or accept being cut out from the biggest part of the fediverse.
Disagree, this tool is meant for use by small instance servers, not large ones. Large ones have to manually handle their list since they are on the hook more for maintaining some kind of policy and announcement structure.) The only way it hurts them as a little guy is if they break the policies of a major instance enough to get blocked by the instance admins, which would take some work for a small instance. (The same or greater amount of effort that would get you banned if you lived on the major instance so no benefit to making it your home there.) And then they only get blocked by that instance and the other small instances using this tool who chose to sync from that major instance. They remain fine on other large instances and small instance that sync from those other large instances instead.
If a large instance does start squashing little people excessively then hopefully that hits the feed and people can pick a different instance to sync from.
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It’s like pruning. Sometimes needed for infected parts, or suckers growing before their time. Too kills the plant.