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.

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.

FYI, in case you ever absolutely NEED it (people still post actual content sometimes only on Reddit that simply does not exist here on the Threadiverse), YSK that Ublock Origin has opt-in “annoyance filters” that definitely takes care of that popup.

Obligatory fuck spez anyway:-P.

This will become our new catchphrase:-)

Much better than: “Do you even Fedi, braugh?”

It’s like running Linux, btw

When the flight started, it was an aisle seat!!

(/s btw, so there’s no confusion)

Whatever do you mean? NOTHING HAPPENED, capiche?

The LLM that wrote this may not have known or cared about the community rules. (PieFed automatically labels posts that look extremely likely to have been written by AI, even if the OP chooses not to voluntarily flag that.)

My suggestions were offered so as to help improve the spread of the message. Labeling something properly helps a ton in terms of engendering greater receptivity.

That the tone was a huge turn-off to me. It’s preaching to the choir, not seeking to convert.

Article uses extremely biased language, not talking much about the titled issue and instead going off on a ranting tirade about “other side bad” - which it may very well be, but this isn’t “news”, it’s heavily skewed opinion. Posting it here in a “news” community I expected otherwise, so in the future you might want to explicitly add "[Opinion]* to the title? Or post to a political discussion community rather than “news”.

It would really help if the rules were clearly stated, and then those exact rules, not some other hidden set entirely, were enforced.

ML comes to.mind, censoring anything negative about China, Russia, or North Korea (how much longer until it adds the USA to that list?), without explicitly stating that anywhere.

It’s the “surprise” aspects that most often turn people away.

Another one is how Hexbears have historically been allowed to troll people all across the Threadiverse. They were explicitly asked not to do that by their own admin team, but there too the follow-up actions did not match the talk.

Unlikely. The leftists actually put in the work to create and populate an entire alternative Reddit (multiple actually: Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, nodeBB, etc.). And the rightists too (multiple actually: Truth Social, X, nostr, etc.). If the centrists truly want something, then somebody is going to have to actually make something happen.

and moderation is crucial: toxicity pushes people away, so we should maybe try to not push our content creators (actual and potential) away.

Thank you for the explanation. That seems all the more confusing then to see boosts done for threaded posts in communities, like is that even comparable to microblog emissions or whatever they are called in magazines, or is it a whole other thing.

People want - and demand - simplicity, or else they seek it out even at the expense of remaining on corporate social media.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1qm1uq1/lets_settle_the_reddit_alternative_discussion/

TLDR: here is a very long list of things that Lemmy will need to do in order to get people on Reddit to try it. Btw PieFed already does most of them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16hkxua/why_im_giving_up_on_lemmyfediverse/

Pretty much what I said earlier.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/143o5xd/reconsidering_my_support_for_lemmy/

https://www.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/170ie8t/regarding_the_recent_complaints_about_lemmy_being/

https://old.reddit.com/r/RedditAlternatives/comments/16zq1dd/the_lemmyverse_aint_all_its_cracked_up_to_be/

This list could go on all day.

They will never reach feature parity.

Redditors, who are primarily USA Christian centrists, will never join someplace where extremists are constantly calling for Luigi-ing everyone in any Western civilizations.

Try it: make an account on lemmy.ml and use it for a day, and make an account on a PieFed instance and do the same. The feature differences are enormous - as too are those that you do not readily see, such as the fact that moderator reports actually federate on one of those two platforms but not the other (tbf they will eventually in an upcoming release).

You will be pleasantly surprised at the outcome if do this experiment.

Yes, although actually I am not aware of any instances that have NOT done this, even like a year or more before it needed done.

Tbf, a TON of information surrounding that issue turned out to be false. Though at its core you may be correct - and yet the same is also true of Lemmy?

Especially in the past, like when Lemmy at first hard-coded a slur word filter (in English no less), and in response Nutomic told people that… well, read for yourself:

If you dont like it, fork it. Stop bothering us about it, we will never fully remove the slur filter.

(Though they later relented.)

PieFed is not perfectly administered (Rimu admitted this, and stepped back from being the sole leader of the project), and neither is Lemmy. Both are imperfect software tools, both offered as FOSS. Yay - we all win with that philosophy!!

At the end of the day though, if someone is relying upon a free instance service, then it is up to those instance admins to decide their policies, while your only choice is which one you will be beholden to. This too is not different from how Lemmy works, though one difference is in how extremely FAST PieFed develops new features, and also in how responsive the devs are. I don’t blame anyone for choosing not to move, but objectively speaking I don’t see Lemmy passing any purity tests more often than PieFed - especially given how it is way easier to install a personal PieFed instance than a Lemmy one.