In the graph above I’ve arranged the 28 Threadiverse instances with at least 200 monthly active users (MAU)—orange instances running Lemmy, green Piefed, and red Mbin—on the basis of which instances they defederate.
Each instance has its MAU count listed below it, sourced from the latest MAU figures at Fediverse Observer, with adjustments made to the totals for Piefed (due to undercounting by outdated instances, as noted here; I used @Vicinus@piefed.zip’s suggested estimate of 7,200 Piefed users) and Mbin (due to tardigram.com having a duplicate listing).
After adjustments, there are an estimated 43,287 monthly active Threadiverse users (35,184+7,200+903), of whom 87.84% are on the 28 largest instances. The percentages listed alongside the MAU figures correspond to each instance’s share of the total MAU count.
Defederation data was sourced from Federation Checker. The tool doesn’t support Mbin instances, so I left fedia.io in its own category. If any defederations are missing, feel free to let me know. Ideally such a chart should also include community blocks to better illustrate which instances block what, but that data doesn’t appear to be as easily searchable.
I also noticed cases of some instances being listed as being defederated by another instance, despite not appearing on the defederation list for that instance (i.e. reddthat.com and lemmygrad.ml are listed as being mutually blocked, despite neither having the other on their block lists). In testing that federation, I noticed that !wholesome@reddthat.com did not federate to Lemmygrad while !memes@reddthat.com did, so clarification on that matter would be helpful.
While I’ll update my generalized chart as needed to correct errors, perhaps at some point an automated federation mapping tool similar to the one feddit.de formerly hosted could be developed to more completely illustrate instance federation.
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dbzer0 refuses to put their “old” interface back up, which I could get around with opnxng - but it keeps going down anyway, so I have switched to lemmy.today thanks to this thread! I prefer less defederation rather than more. I’ll opt out of what I want to opt out of.
OK I think I get how to read this, once I understood the concept. Very nice work.
Maybe it would be a little clearer if the lines where boxes overlap were just slightly offset – it would help see and distinguish them. For example if the blue box was moved down by just a little more than the width of the red lines, instead of being directly on top of them. If that makes sense.
I’ll consider doing that for the revision; thanks for the feedback!
The instance I’m in is definitely the odd ones out, we got no one here😅
102 monthly active users, so if I expand the limit to 100 next time it would be included. Ideally all instances would be represented, but when doing it manually in a chart like this, at some point I have to draw a line.
Yeah, I understand, it would be ALOT to record.
am I reading this right, that blahaj blocks federation from pawb?? that doesn’t seem right
blahaj is in the black box (has defederated fedinsfw.app), in the blue box (has defederated Lemmygrad) and in the red box (has defederated Hexbear). No one on this graph has defederated pawb. The graph is a bit confusing on the first look.
No; the instances in the black box defederate fedinsfw.app, not pawb.
Well that’s a confusing graph.
Yeah I cant understand it at all.
Since defederating is essentially an explicit block list and is directional, my assumption is that the groups that are circled have defederated from the things they’re pointing at. I could be wrong.
Map needs a key/legend.
The red circled stuff seems to be only one possible option, but isn’t visually very distinct, and the red circle shouldn’t be broken like that, just make sure the lines are all visible.
Apologies for the confusion; didn’t want to make it overly cluttered, but in retrospect I see that a legend would have been useful. I’ll incorporate suggestions in a revision.
Yeah, as someone who is struggling to understand the concept of federation…this doesn’t help me at all.
I guess what its saying, if you’re on lemmy.world, you can’t access content on lemmy.zip?
If I’m reading it correctly, lemmy.world cut ties from lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net while hexbear.net and beehaw.org cut ties with lemmy.world. lemmy.zip appears to be connected to everyone.
Why would they do that? I’m unaware of internal issues in Lemmy at this point?
Ideological differences. Lemmy.world is liberal, while lemmygrad and hexbear are hardcore communists (aka tankies).
I believe its not the hardcore communism but the style of users on those instances. hexbear users were brigading communities of other instances, and their moderators did nothing. they earned it.
The ones at the bottom that are below the None category aren’t defederated from anyone, so they can access every instance.
Very proud of lemmy.zip! Joined very early on cause the name sounded cool lol, and apparently a lot of others also did. If i remember right we had a vote on defederations and the only major one to happen(or maybe the only one, idk) was exploding heads which was a nazi instance with CSAM on it so that was obvious, even that was mainly cause of the CSAM. I really like the approach of users being able to block instances and communities rather than the instance deciding for me. I still have ml and hexbear blocked tho cause they banned me after i stood up for trans rights or something lol
Hexbear blocked you for being pro trans? I find that hard to believe.
I disagree with them on a lot but they are a very pro trans group of people
You got temporary banned from the lemmy.ml memes community and permanently banned from the hexbear vegan community and divisionsbyzero mycology community.
I’m feeling the same way. I’ve bounced around a few places since joining. I started on midwest.social which was great for a while, but I think the instance grew more than the dev could keep up with. I started seeing connectivity issues and problems displaying content so I reluctantly migrated to .world to see what joining the largest instance would be like. The technical issues went away but I couldn’t figure out why I could no longer see /c/piracy until I realized that they’re a bunch of pushovers that defederated from dbzer0 based on some liability bogeyman. So I found myself on Lemmy.zip where I can police my own content and have no technical issues.
.zip and Demogodrick definitely cool.
I also lucked out by joining here just because I couldnt join more popular instances at the time. Happy that I landed here
What’s with feddit.org?
There are a lot of threads here about this. Feddit.org wants to keep in line with local laws in their jurisdiction, dbzero thinks that this is a pro-zionist stand and genocide-denial.
If feddit.org was not Zionist they would remove justification for Zionism a genocidal supremacist ideology
The admins of feddit.org are afraid of german police coming for their servers and therefore ban content that is possibly illegal in germany quite liberally. Since german courts are sometimes weird this includes some Pro-Palestine content that could be interpreted as Anti-Israel (e.g. the chant “From the river to the sea…”). That topic in particular pissed of the dbzero community which then defereated feddit.org for being “Zionists”.
DACH under feddit.org removed my German news article on Israel. Apparently even German state media is anti-semitic.
When I posted the same article on German language reddit I got a message that my content had been deemed inapropriate at least.
so ban all discussions about palestine then instead of policing Palestinians voice while letting zionists spread all kind of propaganda in your instance
I mean, it is kinda. Anticipatory obedience makes you complicit.
Yup. Anticipatory obedience isn’t the way to go!
Well, if you have to personally liable for the shit a bunch of internet strangers say, you might think differently. That is one boon of being a mega-corp. You are somewhat immune to SLAPP-lawsuits and the like.
Uhm, this was translated right? “vorauseilender Gehorsam”
I really like this but I can not figure it out. Would you be willing to make the data available?
The MAU numbers for instances were sourced from Fediverse Observer and calculated as a percentage of 43,287 for the percentages, but here’s a table of the defederation data:
Lemmy Instance Defederates lemmy.world Hexbear, Lemmygrad sh.itjust.works Beehaw, Hexbear, Lemmygrad lemmy.zip N/A lemmy.ml fedinsfw.app feddit.org fedinsfw.app, Hexbear, Lemmygrad hexbear.net lemmy.world lemmy.dbzer0.com Lemmygrad, Feddit.org lemmy.ca Hexbear, Lemmygrad lemmy.blahaj.zone fedinsfw.app, Hexbear, Lemmygrad programming.dev Hexbear discuss.tchncs.de Lemmygrad sopuli.xyz fedinsfw.app, Hexbear, Lemmygrad lemmygrad.ml fedinsfw.app lemmy.today N/A slrpnk.net Hexbear, Lemmygrad feddit.uk N/A infosec.pub fedinsfw.app, Hexbear, Lemmygrad, Lemmy.ml reddthat.com N/A jlai.lu Lemmygrad beehaw.org sh.itjust.works, lemmy.world, Lemmygrad, Hexbear pawb.social Hexbear, Lemmygrad thelemmy.club N/A feddit.nl N/A Piefed Instance Defederates fedinsfw.app Hexbear, Lemmygrad piefed.social Hexbear, Lemmygrad piefed.ca Hexbear, Lemmygrad piefed.zip N/A Mbin Instance Defederates fedia.io ? Can someone give me the gossip on fedinsfw.app and feddit.org? What are they? Why is db0zer defederated from feddit.org?
FediNSFW is a Piefed instance dedicated to NSFW content. Some instances defederate it due to that, while (as @Grail@multiverse.soulism.net mentioned) Multiverse and apparently Blahaj defederate it due to it hosting a ‘Fautbait’ community over CP concerns.
Feddit.org strictly enforces German anti-semitism laws on criticizing Israel. As a result, dbzer0 accused it of being Zionist and defederated it. I don’t think criticism of Israel should be removed, but I also prefer to be on an instance with wider federation, which is why I switched my main account from dbzer0 to Sopuli.
Cool, thank you for the explanations!
What the hell are Hexbear and Lemmygrad and what did they do that everyone’s blocking them?
Lemmygrad and Hexbear (I think) are instances filled with “tankies”, which means that they can’t shut up about how awesome authoritarian regimes that present themselves as communist, like China, and some others, like Russia, are, despite all the crimes against human rights those countries’ governments keep committing (according to tankies, the governments they support don’t actually commit any atrocities, it’s just “lies spread via anti-communist propaganda”, which they also use as a excuse for silencing anyone presenting criticism about their favourite regimes). Please keep in mind that lots of communists don’t see countries like China as communist, despite the countries calling themselves that.
As these instances have lots of tankies, they tend to have toxic communities. Their users also tend to hate trans people for some reason, and sometines try to harass people because of it, which is a big no-no to instances that want their trans users to feel safe, such as Blåhaj Zone.
The second “hexbear is anti trans” comment I’ve seen in this thread
I spent a lot of time on hexbear over the last year because I had never run into tankies before. They are definitely problematic, way too ok with killing humans to achieve goals, and willing to lie to win a debate in an ends justify the means sort of way, but they arent anti trans in any way that I saw. If they are lying about their pro trans stance they are putting a ton of effort into it and theyve succesfully tricked me I guess
To add an annecdote, hexbear has this handy link to an image: (nsfw) https://hexbear.net/PPB
Ask yourself why a discussion platform might keep this image quick-link and you may understand why everyone defederates from them.
Lammygrad are Marxist Leninist, Hexbear are dirtbag leftists. That makes them the natural enemies of center-left and centrist instances like .world.
In my opinion it comes down to a disagreement over capitalism. One side wants to destroy it, the other side wants to moderate it.
also worth noting that I’d have all the data in the Lemmyverse.net data, I could probably build a page that shows something similar to this graph.
The beehaw.org/sh.itjust.works defederation is really one-way. Beehaw defederated from us after some exceptionally bad trolls were operating from sh.itjust.works in 2023. IIRC, they requested that we also defederate from them to really make sure the split was made. We honored their request.
We would happily reconnect if Beehaw decided they want to federate with us again. If not, then that’s fine; they have a right to associate with whomever they like.
I believe infosec.pub temporarily defederated from us around the same time for the same reason. It was a rough time.
I’ll adjust the graph by the next version to account for it as an exception.
If you want to complicate the graph further, I believe hexbear federates using an allow list. Blahaj, lemmy.ca, and sh.itjust.works are not on the allow list, so they are effectively defederated. I haven’t looked further to see which other large instances may be affected.
In most cases that a major instance isn’t on the Hexbear allow list, it seems to be an instance that blocks Hexbear already anyhow, so the current layout is sufficient for that. An exception seems to be jlai.lu, which does not block Hexbear yet isn’t on the approved list. In such a case, would the two instances still effectively be defederated?
What’s the beef between beehaw and lemmy.world?
Not so much beef as in beehaw could not manage the torrent of content coming their way from world
According to beehaw there’s no beef, it’s just too many users for them to effectively moderate
Block the “default”. That’s actually pretty clever. Not because you dislike those people, but because it’s the default and requires extra effort to not be a part of.
Does that mean that discuss does not federate with lmmy.ml, lemmygrad, programming.dev and hexbears?
We might read the diagram differently, but I only see a defederation with lemmygrad.
Correct 👍
No, discuss is only in the blue box, which’s arrow points to lemmygrad, so they defederated from them.
You must not read this Graph like a Venn diagram
Yep, I read it as federating with everybody in the same box
That’s not it either. The graph is only illustrating defederations (the arrows), not federations. In other words, the blue box and blue arrow mean that those instances in the box are defederating from the instance the arrow is pointing to.
I say, I really don’t get why so many people stay over on Reddit.
This might be a micro version of the actual future internet, where we walk away from the global model and split it into ideological countries who believe the best way forward is to stop talking to the other group.
We’ve come a long way from drawing artificial lines on maps.
I can understand people staying on Reddit more than those staying on Twitter to be honest.
At least spez hasn’t gone full nazi yet, or provided tools for generating pedophilia.
Both of which people seem to be perfectly fine with. So it doesn’t surprise me they’re fine with Reddit too.
At least spez hasn’t gone full nazi yet
citation needed
The fediverse is great if you fall into the like 5 interests that are pretty well represented here.
But if the communities you wanna engage with aren’t really active enough for potential posters to not just forget they exist, or you don’t really want to be on a platform where 75% of the front page is news or memes about the state of the world politically, its not neccisarily a great replacement to reddit
For me it happens to cover enough of my bases, but I can get why it wouldn’t for many people.
I’ve said this a number of times over the past couple days, but if there’s an instance for mirroring subreddits, where niche subreddits that don’t have an equivalent here yet basically get a carbon copy and a repost bot to stock them with relevant stuff from over there, that could fill in some of those gaps and make the fediverse a more attractive alternative.
It won’t have the same level of engagement right away, but it will provide a place for that engagement to occur, and as more people start using it it will create a network effect. As things stand now, we’re missing a lot of those niche communities.
There is an instance like that - lemmit.online. It’s been going for three years and it’s still a ghost town.
Ah, I see. Yeah, it is a ghost town…
It really is pretty dead outside the main subjects. I have noone to talk about the latest episode of My Adventures with Superman. Did they now just leave the other universe with Clark dead? That sucks.
I do want to watch that. It’s in my list of shows to watch one the first season is done. I normally don’t follow western animation or comics, but he’s so derpy I think it’ll be endearing enough for me to enjoy.
I don’t know if we’re talking about the same show. MAWS is in its 3rd season now. It has been good so far in my opinion.
Just like in real life, one must grow and sometimes create the communities they want to be apart of.
Difficult when people here only like 5 things and they shun everything that is not those 5 things.
While thats true, if my friend whose biggest interests are science informed dog training and animal genetics joins the threadiverse there are not enough people here who genuinely really care about those subjects to actually sustain any of the social connection she’s looking for around them.
If my friend who’s super into basketball and competitive league of legends join she’d have at least a couple people to talk to, but its fundamentally not what she’s looking for to talk to exactly 3 other people who care about the thing she’s into.
I try to remember that as much as I love the fediverse and feel at home here, it has real limitations for lots of people, and its okay if its not in a state they can go enjoy very easily. This is a space that I am passionate about and want to contribute to. I don’t expect everyone to do labor to invest in a space that isnt their passion just to chat with folks when they have the ability to chat with folks somewhere else, even if that place has bigger picture downsides or harms associated with it.
You can still choose one that talks to everybody else. In fact, this graphic might be a nice tool for new users who want advice beyond “Just choose any instance, it doesn’t matter” or “Just use lemmy.world”.
I don’t know if this is better or worse. I do like the selectivity of it, though, where you’re free to join or privately defederate instances
Wow, infosec.pub is based!
Things that pop out to me:
- The Internet was made for porn, both in users and less defederating.
- The main blocks really are mostly the Triad (grad, hexbear and ml) which I get. I personally don’t mind tankies despite the instance I’m on, but they can sometimes echo Russian propaganda that’s demonstrably false. Communism as a concept is ok, though.
The Beehaw thing predates me, I heard they’re nice people, though. I also agree with the sentiment that more fringe groups and random porn might scare away newbies, so I get why things are the way they are.
Our instance deferated fedinsfw because of the adult porn pretending to be child porn pretending to be adult porn. According to Australian law, fake child porn is legally considered child porn, and also our users think it’s gross.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Kinda eye-opening, thx for making the chart. I hadn’t realized it had gotten this bad. In my opinion, defederation should only ever be used to combat spam, not because of ideological differences or disputes between individuals.
One of the most common tips for people looking to switch over from Reddit has been that the instance you choose doesn’t really matter. But it clearly does. Choose the “wrong” instance and you may suddenly find yourself cut off from a sizable portion of other users because someone else decided they know better than you what you should and shouldn’t see.
I’m lucky to be on an instance that has “only” defederated one instance in this chart (lemmygrad.ml). I don’t really follow the drama around here, so I have no idea why that instance is banned. All I see is that there are 558 active users I’ll never be able to interact with just because someone I don’t personally know (my instance admin) made that decision at some point.
Wasn’t there just a big drama because some app developer built-in their own opinionated blocklist into their app or something? How is this any different?
My point being, why not leave these kinds of drastic decisions to individual users, who can and should block whoever they want, instead of dividing threadiverse into silos at the instance level?
Lemmygrad.ml is a Marxist-Leninist instance. The users are very chill there normally, so the reason for defederation is ideological.
Many fantastic instances do exactly that.
But in answer to your question, you may want to research The Intolerance Paradox. In short, when people refuse to follow the rules it kinda becomes spam. Even if you were okay with CSAM or pictures of pigs actively showing the poop falling out of their anuses (sadly, I bet you think I am being hyperbolic here? nope, this is kinda Hexbear’s major schtick), the fact remains that it scares away newcomers.
I will note that if you self-host your own instance then you have perfect control over every aspect of your experience, being able to fine-tune it to perfectly suit your precise needs. Otherwise you will want to choose an instance provider that aligns with whatever your needs are. Some people will choose one of the instances that defederates from almost nothing, while others actually want an experience that is more what they are used to and would expect coming over from the overly bot-modded Reddit, i.e. they want (even outright demand) that censorship be done for them.
This is why the instance pickers need to carefully explain what each instance is about, since there is not just one audience with a single set of needs & expectations.
This is a slanderous mischaracterization bordering on falsehood.
The poop is not actively falling out of the pigs anus, it has clearly fallen fully out but landed on the animal’s balls due to their massive size.
I hope you and I can share a respect of fairness and honesty, and your post will be clarified.
Thank you.
Yeah, I get your argument, and obviously it’s good to have instances with different federation policies. It’s just that when big instances like the ones in this chart start swinging the defederation hammer around, I worry that some (or many) users end up disconnected from users and communities without ever realizing it or agreeing with the decision.
Have you ever tried to organize a fun game night with friends but two of them just can’t get along, ruining the whole thing? That’s kinda the feeling I get from this.
Okay but… have you ever tried to force your group to get together despite those two being unable to get along? e.g. Russia vs. Ukraine? China vs. Taiwan? Israel vs. Palestine? USA vs. a neighbor with oil?
Whether one side (e.g. Ukraine) can “get along with” the other side there (e.g. Russia) depends a LOT on whether they are able to agree to follow some shared rules (e.g. to not murder the other side). These are not mere political differences in the sense of left vs. right, but rather those who are proud to remain ungovernable (while seemingly not understanding what that phrase originally was intended to mean) vs. those who would rather nope out entirely than exist side-by-side with them.
Please also note that Lemmy’s block tools are so misleadingly misnamed as to be almost worthy of the moniker of calling it disinformation. What “blocking an instance” does is to:
- Mute communities on that instance from the user, preventing discoverability and blocking that content from showing in your personal feed, including when browsing All
What that so-called “blocking” does NOT do:
- Hide content from those users submitted to communities on remote instances
- Prevent those users from being able to reply to, famously including vote brigading on, your own content
- Prevent those users from sending you DMs, which at first were not allowed to trigger notifications, but the Lemmy devs reversed that decision and now these “blocked users” can trigger notifications - which bc of the “style” preferred by people on those instances, can continue for WEEKS and WEEKS after you so much as reply to a post that you encountered on All, without having read the sidebar and so not knowing that this style differs from what you are used to
Besides, even if insurance blocking actually worked, it would still do nothing to not showcase the content for an anonymous guest account or a newly created account, i.e. it does nothing to help others deal with “the situation”, only yourself. Which is especially notable when people access Lemmy’s content from apps like Voyager that by default does not show the instance name, thereby treating all content from all instances as being equal. However, I would argue that e.g. Poland does not fear attack from all nations equally - does Poland want to be on guard against Taiwan? Or North or South Korea? What about Russia?
Defederation is a blunt tool, but is virtually the only one offered by the Lemmy devs. When the software is made more robust to offer some other alternative… then this issue can be revisited at that time.
Also, you are free at any to self-host your own instance. But to tell Ukraine and Russia that they must get along… or else what? I am saying that I reject the underlying premise of your argument. “People getting along” should not be the ultimate goal of the Threadiverse. A better goal IMHO would be “People enjoying their experiences while here”. Which for many, means blocking Hexbear - and yes, for some it means NOT blocking it - and therefore since the answer is neither a clear yay or nay, we are forced into preaching the controversy for every new potential member, even though that very complexity itself is often what drives others away.
Though PieFed.zip offers an intriguing and innovative compromise: upon joining the instance a user block is placed upon the Hexbear and lemmygrad instances, and a message sent to the new user about how to remove or place such blocks. This makes federation with those highly controversial instances as opt-in, as opposed to opt-out or impossible to block or not block. That’s really neat! However, that delves into a whole other can of worms on how PieFed instance blocks have problems - namely that people on the receiving end can still reply to them, though only people on the same originating instance will see those replies (or perhaps it’s worse and everyone using Lemmy will see them while everyone using PieFed will not? or perhaps something else altogether?). Also this in turn opens up an entirely new rabbit hole on top of that, where Lemmy and PieFed (and Mbin, and nodeBB, etc.) would need to agree on a set of shared practices…
In short, the technology of the Threadiverse is still quite primitive in so very many ways, despite the upcoming release of Lemmy vs. 1.0. Yes defederation is a very blunt instrument, but it’s all that we have been given to wield for the most part. But the alternative IMHO would be far worse, being forced into allowing bullies to thrive. The Paradox of Intolerance is ironic, but very real: allowing the intolerant to exist in your space, worse yet platforming and even promoting them, means that you yourself are intolerant. Fences between neighbors is the only hope the Threadiverse even has of surviving. Yes you are allowed to be sad at that fact, but it remains true nonetheless. Move past your sadness, to get to what must be done to thrive and move forward in a positive direction?
e.g. learn Rust and contribute to the code development of Lemmy!? Unfortunately, merely donating money is unlikely to help, as much of those funds go into the moderation and instance maintenance costs of the “highly controversial” Lemmy.ml, and the devs have refused to open a way to provide funding for the former independently of the latter. Or learn Python and contribute to development of PieFed? It likely won’t help with interoperability between PieFed vs. Lemmy, and both require investments of several years, but if you want to help then there is no better way. So long as the technology remains as primitive as it is now, these kinds of blunt instruments are all that are available to us - someone would need to invest the effort to provide better.
TLDR: there are extremely good reasons why things are as they are now.
Thank you for taking the time to explain your point of view in such detail. It’s not every day that a Lemmy comment makes me really think or maybe even change my opinion a bit :)
I actually agree with almost everything you wrote. If I were unlucky enough to be friends with both Russia and Ukraine, then sure, that game night would be very unlikely to happen. For science tho, I decided to check what the hell people on Hexbear and Lemmygrad are actually discussing to make everyone and their dog want to block them. Judging by the first two pages of recent threads on both, they seem like generally nice people who I disagree with politically very much, but could still imagine spending a fun evening with without anyone getting murdered. And at most game nights I’ve attended, politics is one of the banned discussion topics anyway xD
Lemme be absolutely clear, I’m not arguing for suddenly reversing the defederation of those two instances. That’s not an argument I’m qualified to make, first of all because I don’t know the full history we have with them. What I’m trying to ask is whether we’re absolutely sure all these defederation decisions are solely based on provable facts and past behavior, rather than some instance admins simply disliking how certain people think and deciding they know better than their users what they should or shouldn’t see. Just like the Tesseract dev recently were exposed trying to do. Because if it’s the latter, then it’s a very dangerous road we are on.
My own experience is that in 3+ years on Lemmy, I don’t remember having a single bad interaction with someone from Hexbear, for example. That’s why I’m so surprised to find so many instances defederating them. I’m not trying to invalidate anyone’s bad experiences, but I think everyone should ask themselves whether they actually had those experiences themselves or have only heard about them from others?
Also worth adding, I fully understand I’m using a free service (although I do make a small monthly donation to my instance) and no instance is obligated to provide a platform for any content they don’t want to. As you said, anyone can host an instance and freely choose who to federate with. But if we cannot trust the admins of these large, well-known, and promoted (e.g. join-lemmy.org) instances to make decisions based on the common good of their users rather than their own personal opinions, then the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers. And that’s something to be plenty sad about.
Btw, I’ve been thinking about hosting my own instance just for myself. But wouldn’t it be really hard to discover new communities that way? To my understanding, an instance only receives posts and comments from communities that someone on that instance is already subscribed to?
99.99% of the time a murderer is not in the process of actively murdering anyone at all… atm. If you look just prior to any major western election, you may notice a difference in the content. Another point there is that the tankie triad is actually HEAVILY moderated - any comment remotely reminiscent of possibly being negative (or perhaps not supportive enough?) about Russia, China, or North Korea gets removed. I might be slightly hyperbolic on this point - I do not care to find the precise dividing lines between what is allowed there or not - but the fact remains that they are HEAVILY curated echo chambers. So… of course people are going to get along inside of them.
Anyway it is not for any of us to say why people want to defederate from a troll or echo chamber instance - if people desire that, then they should have that right, personally for themselves, right? Even though it makes the network effect harder to describe for the rest of us. Again, this would be a totally different conversation if there was a true instance blocking feature existing in Lemmy, but as it is, there is only defederation vs. no defederation, at which point very many instances choose one of the options made available to them.
And no means no? Or at least, it should. And we should respect that too? It is naive to try to force a victim to put up with bullying tactics, especially when it is always an option for the victim to leave the Threadiverse altogether, rather than stay and be subjected to seeing all of that.
You have not had sufficient time yet to fully inform yourself on the subject, but you will get there, at which point you won’t need to simply believe what I say but you will know for yourself. One great place to start btw is the MeanwhileOnGrad community, which documents a bunch of the reasons for division.
I need to add this though: you said yourself that you ignored political topics, yes? So… if you are looking for your keys, and you remember dropping them somewhere, but you restrict yourself to looking everywhere except there, and then don’t find your keys… do you see where I am going with this? Perhaps that was not even your conscious choice: maybe your admins made that decision for you by blocking certain specific user accounts, which would profoundly affect your “view” as to what Hexbear is. Having personally witnessed mods calling for users to kill themselves, then doubling and even tripling down on that, I for one have no trouble believing any of the thousands of other stories about Hexbear’s toxicity. Here is one post that provides a compilation of links: https://discuss.online/post/13916278. Oftentimes the originals get removed so it may be hard now to verify those historical events, with so much time having passed between then vs. now.
And yes, I’ve personally experienced those interactions my very own self. I walked right into a community like ChapoTrapHouse (though perhaps it was one of their ancillary ones?), accessed via browsing All - CRUCIAL NOTE here: therefore I lacked the context of having read the sidebar text first (btw some 3rd party apps seem to go out of their way to hide that even, requiring like 5+ clicks plus moderate scrolling, i.e. buried quite deep) - and I made the mistake of saying something to the effect that Biden was at least working towards lowering the price of gasoline in the USA. I would have been up for a well-grounded discussion, replete with factual information and having cited source material, but instead people relentlessly continued to send me Notifications for WEEKS and WEEKS after I stopped responding, and not messages like “I believe you may be incorrect and here is my reasoning”, but mere emotional vomit, venting their frustrations with the world onto me who dared speak again the trends that prevailed inside of their echo chamber, where beyond a certain level of dissent is no longer allowed. It may help to know that that is the entire point of ChapoTrapHouse, but how would I have known that, browsing by All and not even making a post, just replying to a comment inside of it?
And then either just before or just after that, I made the same mistake again, this time for lemmygrad.ml. Afaik, I am banned from neither space (unless it was done retroactively), but I almost left Lemmy altogether when I realized that it truly was not fun to be here. I continually received notifications for again WEEKS and WEEKS as people continued to dogpile onto that comment. There is no way in Lemmy to disable notifications on a comment btw (this this capability exists in PieFed). Presumably I could have deleted it but I’ve never backed out of my opinion before and that thought literally never occurred to me - I want to be told that I am wrong, when I legitimately am. However, these people were offering idiotic takes, and it therefore became my problem for continuing to entertain those communications.
Another point to note is that nobody is saying that ALL users on the triad, including Hexbear, are bad. Though conversely, if a majority of problematic content is coming from that source, and the mods+admins refuse to do anything about it from their side, then defederation becomes a tool of last resort to try to protect your own users from such harassment - which again, obviously is not coming from literally 100% of the users on those instances. Rather, defederation is reflective of a breakdown in communication between instance admins, with irreconcilable differences that cannot be… reconciled, any other way.
the Threadiverse will slowly but surely turn into a net of isolated echo chambers.
Yes, but (1) this has already happened long ago, much of it predating the existence of the Threadiverse even, like Hexbear is very old and only later switched to using Lemmy, also Lemmy was an echo chamber even before federation with other instances (lemmygrad.ml) was implemented; (2) this theoretical FOMO about “discoverability” should not in practice trump my own personal rights to not have to listen to anything that I do not wish to see - e.g. I do not find it enjoyable to see mods tell users to kill themselves, literally, with a gun; and (3) please DO actually read about The Paradox of Intolerance. Defederation is bad, yes, amputation of a human limb is also bad yes, but sometimes it is preferable to an even worse alternative.
I think we do not differ on ideological grounds though - you concede that IF members of an instance are caught relentlessly trolling and otherwise harassing those of other instances, then in theory defederation is an acceptable outcome? Not an ideal one but… if the software allows for zero other alternatives, as has been the case now for many, MANY years? In that case all that remains is to read some of the examples of this actually happening, which you had not encountered before. The links I included above should be a good place to start at least, but there are just tons and tons and tons more where that came from.
Hypothetically, imagine someone saying “death to America”… okay, perhaps they should have the right to think it, perhaps even say it, but why should I have to be forced to hear it, constantly, and not be allowed to do anything at all to stop it? Defederations are decisions that instance admins have made regarding what content they will allow to be platformed on their machines or not. They NEED to have the right to make this decision for themselves.
This in turn places the burden of deciding which instance to join or not onto the end-users. You will want to pick one that matches your values. Here too it gets difficult, especially when instances are not forthcoming about what or particularly why they do what they do. Very little to almost no progress has been made on this front IMHO, at least on the Lemmy side, except to offer the generic advice to join Lemmy.zip or perhaps better yet PieFed.zip and use its significantly enhanced (yet still very imperfect and in fact quite problematic in other, just different ways) instance blocking tools of PieFed.
Note that defederations with smaller instances (representing 12% of users) are not represented here, so there are even more defederations than what is listed here. Hopefully that will come across better with more data in the next version of the graph.
As requiring new users to implement multiple blocks off the bat can be a big ask for those still on the fence about leaving Reddit, defederating known NSFW, troll, and tankie instances can improve new user retention. For those who prefer more hands-off moderation practices, specific instances can cater to them, but I think a more tailored experience is better for users arriving from Reddit.
As requiring new users to implement multiple blocks off the bat can be a big ask for those still on the fence about leaving Reddit, defederating known NSFW, troll, and tankie instances can improve new user retention. For those who prefer more hands-off moderation practices, specific instances can cater to them, but I think a more tailored experience is better for users arriving from Reddit.
There’s a better approach for this, which is the one lemmy.zip takes: instead of defederating major but controversial instances for politics (as opposed to legal issues, which I completely understand), new user accounts have those instances blocked by default (user-level block). Problem solved. Newbies don’t see posts that may scare them (oh no, communism!), but they can choose to see them if they wish.
Good point 👍
I think the main issue is that this isn’t communicated clearly. Most people joining a random instance listed on join-lemmy.org won’t know what defederation means and they have no way of knowing that by choosing that particular instance they’ll be cut off from a certain number of other users.
I’m not so sure, I’d rather have a prepopulated blocklist that I can further configure myself, as opposed to instance level blocks that I can’t reverse.
I’m not so sure, I’d rather have a prepopulated blocklist that I can further configure myself, as opposed to instance level blocks that I can’t reverse.
Exactly, same here, as long as the defederation isn’t for legal reasons, which I would understand. This is the approach that my instance (lemmy.zip) takes.
Idk, that is exactly how lemmy.zip does it. Fairly straight forward if you ask me.
They were advocating for instances defederating other controversial, but major instances. The approach lemmy.zip takes is to default block those, but each user can remove those blocks if they wish.
This is what organic growth looks like. It spreads in fits and starts, bits of it clump together and pile up, pieces of it separate and take on life of their own or die. When part of it rots (hexbear) the larger organism cuts it off to limit the spread of disease.
Lemmy (and more generally, ActivityPub) is growing, not like a rose bush, but like a field of grass. Some pieces of it are blooming, some pieces of it are dying, some pieces are adapting to different environments, but the spread is inexorable and the horizon unlimited.
If you want to see what the field is like on the other side of that hill, well it won’t just come to you, you’ll have to get up and go to it.
