Spyke

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lemmy

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r/The_Donald now on Lemmy (edit: not anymore)

It is easy now with defederation.

De-federation isn't the tool to solve this specific problem. That community has 34 posts, all by a single user, and under 30 total comments across all threads. I cannot find a single post or comment in that community that would violate any rules on lemmy.ml.

A single user posting content in a community that shares a name with a banned community on another social media platform seems like a very very low bar to push for de-federation.

agora

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[Discussion] Potential of a Meta ActivityPub client

If meta wants to harvest data they would just create boring no-name servers to pull down the data that they want. De-federation isn't going to stop that.

The goal isn't to create a system where there are no corporate instances. The goal is to create a network that doesn't rely on corporate instances.

This idea that we use use de-federation like a weapon will cause the Fediverse to fragment and then we're back where we started: 50 different social media services and a fragmented social media experience. De-federation isn't a super downvote button, its use should be limited to boring server-related things (spam, complying with laws, etc).

The strength of federated social media is that it is all available for everyone at all times via one account. Breaking the network into small chunks or having some central group decide who gets to have access to social media is the exact thing that the ActivityPub protocol is suppose to help people escape from.

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RIF developer counters Reddit CEO’s claims that he didn’t want to work with Reddit

No matter how you look at this Spez fucked up.

The protest is hurting ad dollars, some amount of users have migrated away and Reddit has received a ton of negative press.

Spez admits that the top two API users are no longer going to be selling their product. He doesn't speak about this like he regrets it. If he were serious about selling API access, he literally lost his two largest customers by refusing to work with them and slandering them.

Apollo said that they quoted him $20M/yr and he said in further interviews that the reason he couldn't make it work is because he sold the app to people for up to a year license and the cost he sold them to would be too low to cover his costs. If Reddit was willing to work with him on timeframe or costs he could have implemented a solution that would have let the users pay the fee (like $2/mo) and enough profit for him to continue working. Instead Spez provided no flexibility on price or timeline. He torpedoed his largest customer costing Reddit upwards of $20M/yr in revenue. The same with RIF.

Reddit is getting $0/mo from them when they were not unwilling to work with Reddit on the pricing. They just needed flexibility that Spez wouldn't provide.

He fucked this up royally.

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Why does it say "pending" when I try to join a community outside of my local Lemmy instance?

It's not a bug. You're trying to subscribe to a Beehaw community.

What happened is that Beehaw has de-federated Lemmy.world. They've essentially banned, from their instance, all users on the lemmy.world instance. This was due to a combination of Beehaw having very heavily moderated communities and the influx of new users onto your (and my) instance.

Some of the new users were trolling the Beehaw communities (including user posting a picture of their penis in a Feminist community) and couldn't be banned because they could just re-create an account on these two instances as they were running with open sign-ups (Beehaw requires manual approval of user sign-ups).

Because of these things Beehaw's moderation team de-federated lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works until they could work with the two instance owners to come up with a solution. As of last update, they had reached out to lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works' admin staff but had only heard from sh.itjust.works. They said they're confident in re-federating at some point but have not provided a timeline.

Until then you will not be able to access Beehaw communities or see any posts from Beehaw users until the de-federation has been lifted.

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Why does it say "pending" when I try to join a community outside of my local Lemmy instance?

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Man, people are really over using Nazi. At this point it's basically become: 'things I don't like'.

Beehaw is, if anything, very left and was trying to get rid of trolls that they couldn't ban because the troll would just make a new account in 5 seconds on one of our instances. I'm not at all a fan of de-federation, see our community discussions, but I understand the problem they were trying to avoid.

It seems like a pretty defensible position to not want random trolls posting pictures of their penis on random communities. They were unable to resolve the problem with the moderator tools that they had so they were forced to de-federate. Not exactly the Third Reich.

main

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FYI, lots of users are polling to defederate sh.itjust.works

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We're not just running polls and blindly following the results. I think the the goal of having a community discussion place is to help identify the people who are actively trying to participate in the process and then take their views into account in deciding the future of things.

Ultimately, like all instances this is functionally a dictatorship because @TheDude runs the server and has the ultimate say in everything. He's created an area where people can voice their opinions and his intentions appear to be to parse the discussion and make an informed decision based on the results.

I doubt he'd be fooled by some position suddenly having 2500 bot comments saying 'Nay'.

agora

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[Discussion] Some of the most active instances will eventually silo themselves

I see the Fediverse as a network that can subsume all existing social media networks. In order for that to work we have to fight to make sure the network is as cohesive as possible. This includes places that contain content or opinions that we won't agree with.

I think de-federation should be very limited and mostly a low level administrative function.

Fighting spam is a good example or what I mean. Since anybody can make an instance and have it spew spam users/comments into the greater community. The ability to unlink from these instances is a vital tool for making the network run smoothly.

Illegal things like CSAM or sites that engage in the orchestration of violence, doxing or online harassment are, to me, a red line for content that cannot exist on the network. Too many locations, where instances are hosted, have laws against these things and allowing federation of instances with this type of content can leave the instance owners open to legal issues. Because of that, they cannot be federated with.

The sticky part, and where people argue the most, is when it comes to viewpoints that they consider extreme. To take a US viewpoint (as I'm a US user) the current culture war issues in the US create a flashpoint where essentially every side is convinced that they're correct and that the other side is literally evil and that should justify not federating with them.

I don't think it takes much investigative work to see that I'm more on the left end of the spectrum. On top of that, I live in a rural area and so I'm constantly having to interact with people on the right who have opinions that I find... extreme. The thing that I've found is that if you can engage with them as a person, have some empathy and understand their viewpoints it usually isn't hard to dissuade them of their more extremist notions. Most people are simply a product of the media that they consume, they're not evil they're just repeating things they heard and things that made them feel outraged or afraid.

Being able to provide that opposing viewpoint and to engage with people who seem otherwise unreachable is incredibly important to moderating the worst viewpoints. The idea of de-federating instances is the antithesis of this idea. All that is doing is walling them into a bubble where they only ever hear opinions that agree with them and nothing builds extremism like never being told that you're wrong and never having to defend your ideas. I think it is better for the health of all of society to keep the lines of communication open to instances that maintain the bare minimum of standards for their content.

I know that not everyone agrees with this idea and I certainly understand the draw and comfort of being able to just put them out of your mind but I also think that the right things to do isn't always the most comfortable thing to do.