Maybe a better Threadiverse Major Defederations Graph?
idk it's my first time (kind of) trying to do dataviz, I thought the original post was super interesting but like other comments said, it was hard to read.
I think in a way it's mostly because defederation is complex to show as links, since it is the break of said link, but hopefully this type of graph is better ?
you do lose the "group" of instances view, though (and also I did not bother with per instance MAU as raw number + percentage, or sofware used)
let me know what you think!
83 replies
So why does everyone hate lemmygrad and hexbear? I'm out of the loop on that.
they are too extreme for the normal extremists.
tankie bullshit
I notice that it presents sites with the same editorial body as separate cases, such as piefed.ca and lemmy.ca. Perhaps it would make sense and potentially improve readability to collapse any cases that have the same in and out arcs as each other. (So, all the cases that have no blocks and only block lemmygrad as one collapsed entry, for example.)
It doesn't even Include https://lemmy.today/ that has no defederation or blocking at all, and has never had, since the admin feels it's up to the user and not the admin to decide these things. You know, free and open internet, remember?
Also one of the best themes of all Lemmy instances if you ask me.
Came here to say that!
I can't comprehend why people would join instances in the list. If you don't like a particular instance, just hop into the user settings and block it! Why let others set your blocklist?
because it's less work.
Doesn't take much noormally. But still, I think Lemmy would benefit from adding custom filter lists that users can enable or disable at will.
You gotta ask the OOP about that, but my guess is, in a graph that shows instances that defederate, why include an instance that doesn't?
I see your point I guess. Perhaps defederation is something that users want, and then they are happy to see who does it the most?
Im not like that myself, but I can see the point.
Now I am curious what is going on in fedinsfw.
porn that makes most folks uncomfortable
Reposting porn from other sites i assune
It's very pretty and a worthwhile attempt, but personally I think it's rather unreadable lol. All you need is four circles for the four major groups that defederate.
Ah, thankyou! As a lazy person not sure who my instance was blocking, I now know. Excellent. Better find an instance who doesn't block any instances.
It would be cool to have something like the internet map but of the fediverse
There is https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map but I don't know how accurate it is
edit: it looks completely off at first glance lol
Hexbear uses a whitelist so they are not federated with a bunch of these instances besides .world
The Hexbear Great Firewall exists to keep the Beanis contained
This makes much more sense thanks
A bit scarier than the previous one at first glance, but the single line explanation including everything needed to understand makes it easier to read.
Something though, I think it'd be better to have a cut-off of MAU or some other relevance metric, as otherwise smaller instances defederating from major ones may sneakily make the major one seem more isolated than it really is.
Or scale arrow size by MAU, I don't know.
That sounds like a great idea, that's some of the most important information.
The similar color makes it slightly difficult to read but the graph is better, and easier to understand. Anyways, you are skilled, good job :3
Yeah the 3 yellows really are hard to differentiate.
I know lots of folks look at this and see a shattering of the what they expect. The Fediverse is NOT a platform. Lemmy.world is NOT the Threadiverse. Let's break these bonds. I left a server because I was suspected of being a CIA plant. I went to one that was more welcoming. I found they were too strict for me on their rules. I left that. I'm not on piefed.social. I'm planning on running my own piefed for ME and MY family/friends hopefully SOON^TM. If someone defederates from me, that's ok, they didn't want me to be a part of their community. MY community still exists.
These aren't platforms that are out there trying to save the entire world. They're building a community that interconnects to other communities. Don't like how they're doing it, you can literally spin up your own for dollars per month.
Yes, if you want your stuff to be found you have to advocate for it.
I think the Trek communities are stand outs of how this works and how it should be done. Think of like old Forum days. Normally folks would create a forum for a specific topic and other thigns would go other places. But now those forums connect and you can run your own and connect to everyone.
Break this idea that this major pillars disconnecting are fracturing the fediverse. IMO the more small instances we have the stronger the network.
So build a Piefed/Lemmy/Mastodon/GoToSocial/Bonfire whatever for your community and then allow those to connect out to others.
The idea of this change is scary though. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we can't exist the way I hope we do. But I think humans strive for community and communication and we have a new way to provide it to them.
Well said, agent Johnson.
God bless the U.S. of A
There are 500 Lemmy instances and 80 PieFed instances which are too small to show on the graph :)
It would be cool if every instance were a circle, and then you could see the lines
Besides, and related to "not being a platform", it helps break the idea of everyone having to share the same space with everyone. If two groups can't have a healthy relationship, it is healthier for them to cut ties with each other. Meanwhile, the oligarchic platforms being as big and with barely any internal borders makes for the toxic environment of places like Reddit and Twitter that predates recent polemics.
Not so easy.
Mostly a liability issue.
First there's security - make sure the server doesn't get compromised.
Then you need to figure out how to deal with illegal content like CSAM (was already a widespread issue on Lemmy at least once, causing multiple instances to shutdown) - even on private instance due to content caching.
And legal issues such as minimum age and privacy regulations that you'd have to comply with.
3rd one is not an issue if you only use it yourself, and perhaps with a couple of friends that won't try to sue you when they get mad.
Agreed. Its federated. Let instances do thier thing. It gives us more options not less.
I always thought that people are drawn into the default instances because they have less friction to sign up and login in third-party apps. Along with new people not quite grasping how the fediverse works when they start using it.
Yes. This. Big Tech has taught folks that there's only ONE place to sign up. We have to help folks realize, and undo the damage, of centralization. And that's going to be a very personal and community minded idea. We shouldn't be going up to everyone and yelling "SIGN UP TO MASTODON!" Because we'll get "how?" And the answer will be mastodon.social. Instead we need to find groups, let's say your local gaming group and say "hey I set up this thing that allows us to talk about our local gaming group and OH YEAH it connects to all this other cool shit btw."
One point of order, you lost slrpnk.net's defederation of hexbear.net
Ah my bad I gotta redo it now
I'm on sh.ijust.works because it has a bad word in it. I don't know what you're all complaining about
Amen, sib. If there's one with cunt in its name we'll go there!
In addition to comments others have made about some of the colors being difficult to see/differentiate, I think it would be worthwhile to distinguish one-way defederation from mutual defederation, perhaps with a texture?
It would make the graphic busier, but I also would enjoy seeing population percentages next to each instance name (to give weight to the significance of certain defederations, e.g. how much of the fediverse are you excluding by defederating with hexbear vs lemmy.world).
This graph is a lot more understandable, but the yellow is hard to see. I can't tell what instance lemmy.ml is defederating.
I assume for you it may be because of your display type. But that made me think of colorblind people and how much this format probably totally excludes them as an entire swath of the population
I'm colorblind. It does :/
Do you have any design suggestions for op? (Assuming they're the originators of this chart)
Because as it is, this data is pretty hard to concisely portray. Whoever made this decided to use color, alone, which, even for me who is not colorblind, thinks could use some improvement. Design IS hard, the question is how.
Chiming in as the OP, I used rawgraphs.io which only has 2 colour palettes for this amount of data (the first one only covers 7 colors the rest becomes grey), there's the option to pick your own colours and I considered picking colours from instances logos so they would fit. No idea if that would have been better for accessibility. In general there are colourblind-friendly colour palettes suggestions out there and I should have checked them first!
In this particular instance, I don't have many suggestions other than, maybe change the saturation?
To give an example, the rainbow pride flag has always looked muddy to me;
But I recently saw a colorblind friendly version that, to my eyes anyway, looks really good. I can much more easily distinguish the stripes in this one:
I don't know the exact mechanics of how these are different. But maybe there's a lesson here about colorblind friendly stats representation?
You've managed to nerd snipe me with the colourblind friendly Pride flag, the second one somehow looks really good!
The second flag's colors look extremely well balanced in both brightness and color variance between them. That's weirdly satisfying to look at.
But yeah, just having higher contrast in the chart would be a good start. Maybe some kind of three dimensionality with graded shadows? Or like have them as lines, and have them not have such similar angles? But then I expect that to be messy and not quick to read, either.
fedinsfw.app looks like.
The porn one.
I’m kinda surprised that so many instances have defederated from fedinsfw.app It’s just porn, right? Who cares?
Maybe I’m naive and missing an important point. If so, I apologize for my ignorance.
The way the apps and frontends are setup, its easy enough to use alts for different usecases instead of having porn attached to general instances. Seperating gooner personas from regular is a positive imo. Keep that energy on the nsfw instances, banning them isn't like reddit getting rid of a community, everyone still can sign up and access it on the same app they already use. I always hated scrolling on r/all and seeing porn every 5 posts (nsfw tag covers a lot of non porn) Doesn't mean I don't use reddit for porn, I think I wouldve preferred having an alt there that only showed porn subs and vice versa with my main account showing none. Some seperation is healthy imo.
If people want porn there's a million places they can look instead. It makes sense to just remove porn spam from your instance, most people don't really want it in with everything else. Also, it's harder to moderate or find people willing to moderate it.
Okay. Those all sound like good reasons. Thanks!
i havent seen any of the discussions leading to this, but i assume the sheer amount of images/video takes up a lot of space, so they instances decided to avoid it altogether.
that and potential risks if something particularly unsavory becomes mirrored on your instance.
i know blahaj at least defederated it because of "a community for porn of women that appear to be under 18" (direct quotation from a local-only post)
i couldn’t find it myself (there’s a lot of communities on there!) but i’m guessing it’s some sort of "barely legal" porn community, which is gross (but unfortunately very common). so good riddance imo
Ick. That’s a good reason, too.
It's not just porn.
It's pretty much all fetish and kink stuff... At least last time I looked. Including cartoons of children. Maybe worse than cartoons. Noped out quick. Cops find that shit in your cache and you might be going to prison.
This graph is indeed a lot more intuitively readable. I think it could be improved further by avoiding needlessly crossing the arrows, like for example pawb.social -> lemmygrad.ml is crossing multiple other arrows, even though they are right next to another. Some arrows could also be shorter to avoid crossings, like beehaw.org -> sh.itjust.works
Cool diagram.
If you removed hexbear and lemmygrad (nearly everyone defederates them so they just clutter the place up) then the other information would be clearer. For example I didn't notice that beehaw has defederated both lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works until my third viewing.
Lot of unnecessary lines crossing. Why do the 5 at the top left not just swoop around instead of crossing 2 or 3 others? Why do the two defederating lemmy.world cross each other?
3 yellows and two slightly orange and slightly green yellows are hard to differentiate at times.
What a mess. Not the graph, just all the netsplits in general.
I like this representation a lot.
I find this much harder to read than the previously posted diagram, and it contains less information.
Yes, despite the problems with the other one, I found it easier to read. This one has too many crossing connections, and loses the groups.
I have to say, now it's even more amusing to hear people claim '.world is a bunch of narrow minded [whatevers] who block all opinions they don't like' (2 instances 😱)
Specifically the 2 instances that everybody blocks, and it’s mostly fans of those two instances that complain about it.
2 of the major instances in this graph. They might block many more that are smaller but I didn't check.
I find it mildly interesting that there's no inverse of lemmygrad, that defederates from everybody else
Some instances use allowlist meaning other servers are defederated unless added to the list. Hexbear is the only major instance that uses this model, to my knowledge.
beehaw?
Not according to this graph
Defederation is often seen as a last resort and generally seen pretty negatively. Defederating everyone would also get rid of most content
Yeah but this graph would have so much more data >:)
I should sort my ties this way…
It's a very clear visualization. I do agree that some indication of the scale/activity of the instances would be a nice addition.
I also think you should add a date, as the relationships and active servers will likely change over time. If you keep it up, eventually you'll have a collection that illustrates the changes.
When I saw it I thought of this quote: "Why Is It When Something Happens, It's Always You three?" Tbh I didn't know about 2 of 3 Top 3 defederated instances, I know why feddit is defederated, but why is lemmygrad?
lemmygrad is pro authoritarian
Oh.... I understand now why it's banned, thanks!
Modern liberal democracy is authoritarian too, it's just that a different group of people hold the keys. Would you support defederating with every instance that is aligned with liberal democracy?
I can see that some Western countries lean towards authoritarian, but for example Switzerland? How is this country authoritarian?
Tbh, I can understand the reasons why some instances want to defederate from others. if I look in scenario that I'm the administrator of my own instance I don't know if I would defederate from any instance, like I don't think I'm knowledgeable enough about every instance and about their own quirks
Every state is going to be authoritarian, if I had to choose I personally prefer a workers dictatorship to a dictatorship of capital.
As it is, bright yellow on a white background results in me barely being able to see who any of the lemmy instances defederate from.