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the latest MAU figures at Fediverse Observer, with adjustments made to the totals for Piefed (due to undercounting by outdated instances, as noted here; I used @Vicinus@piefed.zip’s suggested estimate of 7,200 Piefed users) and Mbin (due to tardigram.com having a duplicate listing).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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Well that’s a confusing graph.
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 I cant understand it at all.
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.
Yeah, .zip gives its users full autonomy to block instances/users as they see fit, which is why I’m on their instance.
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.
No hexbear was never federated. They started discussing whether to federate and writing moderation rules, sent them to other admins for input, and .world preemptively put hexbear on their defederation list. .world basically said it was ideological differences, they posted all the parts of the draft hexbear rules where they were explaining that hexbear was communist/anarchist and anti-western, and that was just a self-evident reason to preemptively defederate.
oh, that’s right, forgot how .world was with it. but they earned it for the rest of the fediverse.
It’s a question if history is real and if it matters or not.
A big contention is about the historical and political reality of Ukraine (spoilers in my instance .tld)
The “anti western” communists claim that the USA publicly bragged about doing a regime change on Ukraine, like before they did it, and the CIA affiliate even published the money they supported the organizer of the euromaidan protests with on their own website. Besides trained him. They also claim there were Nazis and that there are newspapers reports about this. They even unironically want to rehabilitate Stalin and the state violence of the great purge that passed about 10% of the population through a gulag! Imagine doing this in the USA today with all the MAGAts and corrupt officials and landowners in order to reeducate them and prevent a counterrevolution!!! Clearly they are insane.
And these are all lies because that is what Putin says and Putin is evil. So the good liberals of .world rightfully point out that all this is nonsense and Ukraine has always been neutral and the revolution of dignity must not be impinged by dirty commies. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia. The liberal socialists agree that this is a time where we need to band together and return to normalcy, because obviously we can’t have all this aggravation and it’s better to be inside the tent pissing out, no matter much fun it is to be on the outside pissing in.
This is all besides the question of ideology, collectivism and all that unamerican crap lol.
My personal opinion: You cannot have rational discourse with insane people in an insane society. It also means lemmy has failed as a global medium for meaningful political discourse. While the communist instances (the original developers btw) are pretty extreme and hostile, .world managed to monopolize much of lemmy and enforce (neo)liberal majority opinion on lemmy.
Obviously this is all satire. Nobody is planning a global war on democratic socialists or something.
The ones at the bottom that are below the None category aren’t defederated from anyone, so they can access every instance.
I could have sworn that hexbear defederated from jlai.lu. there was a whole spat between our instances a while back.
As someone informed me, Hexbear is unique in that most of its “defederations” are just instances that aren’t on its approval list. Jlai.lu doesn’t defederate Hexbear itself, but isn’t on the approval list, so I guess that’s effectively a defederation; I’ll adjust the next version of the chart to account for that.
Thanks for the work, really interesting graph! I think it *might be easier to read if the rectangles were ovals or some morph between rectangle and oval, so that the overlapping groupings are a bit more distinct.
Thanks for the feedback; I’ll try to make the groupings more distinct in the revision.
Ok, I’ll be the one to ask: What happened that 6 instances with 13% of the population combined blocked the porn instance?
As many instances were already blocking the original lemmynsfw.com, I suspect most do it as a means of moderating the feeds of new users who might not want to see porn. An alternative to this (as mentioned by @Cricket@lemmy.zip) would be blocking access to its communities (versus the instance itself) by default, allowing users to see replies from fedinsfw.app users and unblock the communities should they wish to. In either case, I think user retention is better served by limiting access to such content to those who are specifically interested in it.
For Multiverse and apparently Blahaj specifically, they defederate it over CP concerns due to it hosting a ‘Fautbait’ community.
An alternative to this (as mentioned by @Cricket@lemmy.zip) would be blocking its communities (versus the instance itself) by default, allowing users to see replies from fedinsfw.app users and unblock the communities should they wish to.
Hey thanks for tagging me, but let me clarify because that’s not exactly what I meant. Lemmy.zip doesn’t block any communities by default (as far as I can recall, at least). It blocks a couple of instances by default, and each user can remove those blocks if they wish. This is different from defederating from those instances because defederation cannot be controlled by users, only by admins, but it’s still an instance block, not community block.
Just registered, this is correct.
Thanks for confirming.
Thanks for the clarification 👍 Clarified with italics that what is being blocked is access to the communities, rather than a direct blocking of individual communities.
The key distinction I wanted to highlight—aside from unblocking being an option—was that users from the blocked instance can still interact with communities on the blocking instance, compared to defederation.
No problem 👍
Makes sense, thanks for the background!
I always felt it was strange that it didn’t just happen at the client level. Should have had flags in the initial design and moderate to enforce. Just turn the default off on all clients people can turn it on if they want.
The fautbait stuff is obviously a deeper problem
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!
This looks like a job for… The Defedestrator
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
i’ve been blocked for being pro trans in many communities.
because I’m not pro-trans enough. so i must want to kill all trans people. or so their logic goes.
it’s not really often a reflection of the instance or the community, so much as one really really angry user or a few, who have decided you’re the scum of the earth for voicing an opinion they don’t agree with 120%. you know, toxic nutbag users.
extremists often thing anyone isn’t as extreme as them is committing a hate crime against them.
anyway, i haven’t been banned anywhere since, since i blocked the instances from which those types of folks tend to come from. and they overwhelmingly come from a few instances, and making a post in their instances basically paints a target on your back and they stalk you across the fediverse because well, that’s the type of user they are. they could just… block you. but you know, that would be too simple, they need to feel like they have punished you for not agreeing with them.
You got temporary banned from the lemmy.ml memes community and permanently banned from the hexbear vegan community and divisionsbyzero mycology community.
Oh i thought it was a perma ban. Also how can i check this? Cause i got banned after commenting about trans rights but i guess that wasnt why i got banned, tho the memes community ban might be that. 2 years is still insane tho. As for the other, yeah i was anti-ai in an ai community and not a vegan in a vegan community, but the way that is phrased is insane.
you then can filter it by your name, you might need to use lemmy.zip/modlog
The expires: 2 years ago might mean the ban ended 2 years ago
Now that i check i see that i got banned from like 20 ml communites, and for st least 1.5 years but i think it was 2(idk how the modlog thingy rounds it). Reason i thought i got banned completely is because they banned me from every community from ml that i had ever commented on.
.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
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.
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?
In such a case, would the two instances still effectively be defederated?
I think so? That’s what I would expect, at least.
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.
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.
Just like in real life, one must grow and sometimes create the communities they want to be apart of.
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.
Difficult when people here only like 5 things and they shun everything that is not those 5 things.
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…
Someone explained that that exists and hasnt connected with people, but I think a big part of why it hasnt is that theres no real social drive to comment or engage with something if theres zero chance the poster might see it. It kinda feels like you’re just speaking into the void, or talking to yourself
Thats how I feel about it at least 🤷🏻♂️ if a human reposts stuff at least you can chat with the reposter about it, if its the kind of post where that makes sense. If the post is a “hey look at this thing I did”, the reposter can’t really say how it went or discuss the experience
That makes sense. I guess it would mainly only work for posts linking to articles, but we already have that honestly
Yeah. Honestly I feel like if it were to be helpful the best application would probably be a mixed one, where a mod still uses and checks the inbox on the not account. So only partially automated, and only makes up some of the posted content
And I think it’d probably also work best if the mod picked what was to cross post and it could all just be put into a que, rather than just cross posting anything and everything. That way they can select stuff that would make sense to post even if they aren’t the originator: memes, articles, info-posts/guides, etc.
It’d still be less work than manually finding a ton of stuff to post, but still be much more intentional and interactive feeling.
Yeah, that makes sense. I like that idea
Thanks! ☺️
Hope you have a lovely day! ❤️
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.
Maybe try making a post on one of the movies or shows comms (I’m not familiar with it and don’t know if its a movie or a show. Though you can also just post where people are.)
c/casual_conversations can also be a place to chat
I think in some cases on the threadiverse communities just have to be more catchall, because there aren’t enough people to congregate around a more specific topic. But there may be other people out there who would love to chat about that with you, even if there aren’t enough for a specific community for the show
(Apologies if youve already tried this, I just had the problem solving thought and figured I’d share. If its not helpful thats okay :)
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.
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 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
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
I say, I really don’t get why so many people stay over on Reddit.
This place fuckin sucks man? It’s pretty much reddit for left wing progressives who specifically care about left wing American* politics, linux, and not much else
While it would be nice if there were more activity, when the alternative is the ever-enshittifying Reddit, our best option is to contribute what we can here, be as welcoming as possible to new users, and block any content that isn’t interesting to achieve a personalized feed of one’s preferred content.
You can always post eco-fascist Australian memes if that’s more your thing
@Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz this is what I mean, cunts everywhere in this place, why would I encourage anyone to come here?
Banned 1 day for being disrespectful. Next one is a perma.
Unfortunately there are too many people here who would rather be brash and rude at the hint of any disagreement, rather than discussing civilly and promoting a healthy community that is not an echo chamber.
My best advice is to just block people who you find rude to make the remainder slightly less rude on average.
That guy was brash, but I somewhat agree with him. This place is full of people who left reddit for a multitude of reasons. Just think about that. Reddit didn’t suffice for the vast majority of people here, and now those same people are circlejerking each other in an echo chamber the size of McDonald’s PlayPlace tube. This is why Lemmy, in my opinion, won’t last long.
That and McDonald’s PlayPlace tubes smell like socks.
I also don’t think the Threadiverse should be an echo chamber, nor do I think that user deserved a temp ban for expressing their frustration with it. Ultimately, fewer defederations, more acceptance of differing opinions, and being welcoming of users who aren’t interested in politics are the primary viable means for the platform to grow beyond being a niche echo chamber.
I’m a cunt? I’m just encouraging you to follow your dreams.
You can even post anti-linux memes with that one other guy.
That’s slander!
We also like Star Trek!
We are not interested in you recommending similar toxic people, as you support genocide in Palestine
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 ? 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
They only like trans people when they agree with them. See: Hexbear attack Blahaj every time
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.
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.
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!
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Same
What’s the number and oercebt next to the arrows though?
The number is the number of instances within the box blocking the instance in question, whereas the percentage is the percentage of overall Threadiverse users that those instances represent. For instance, at least 64.01% of Threadiverse users (the actual figure is higher as the 12% of users on smaller instances are not accounted for) cannot access Hexbear communities or interact with Hexbear users.
I’m keen for v2. I still don’t get it but I’ve been here a while now and want to work out how this stuff works (including Lemmy, PieFed, Mastadon crossposts, comments etc).
Seems easy on the surface but once you dig it’s some specialised knowledge.
Good work dude.
Ultimately most of the process involved adding additional columns to data extracted from Fediverse Observer, most importantly the block lists from Federation Checker.
From there, the hardest part was figuring out how to lay things out in a way that enabled instances with similar block lists to be placed in adjacent groups in a way that’s understandable while leaving room for arrows.
Have gotten helpful feedback so far, so hopefully the next version will be easier to understand.
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.
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 👍
Thanks 👍
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.
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.
much of those funds go into the moderation and instance maintenance costs of the “highly controversial” Lemmy.ml,
That’s not true at all, the maintenance costs of lemmy.ml’s are miniscule compared to what the devs get.
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?).
As I understand it, keeping in mind it’s been a bit since I looked at it, it depends on where the community the interaction is taking place in is hosted. That’s always the central truth and where other instance collect the votes, comments etc. from. So say piefed user Alice blocks a user Bob who is on a different instance, or the instance Bob is on altogether.
If Bob then replies to Alice in a community hosted on lemmy then the reply is accepted and federated out to everyone. Alice’s instances notes that she blocked Bob and drops the replies, no one on Alice’s instance can see them.
If Bob replies to Alice in a community hosted on Alice’s instance then Bob’s instance logs the reply, sends it to Alice’s instance where it gets discovered that Alice blocked Bob and the reply is silently dropped. Any instance now checking the community for new comments will not receive Bob’s reply since Alice’s instance dropped it. Bob’s instance however already logged the reply, so it remains local to Bob’s instance only.
What I don’t know is what happens among piefed instances, I think there is some functionality to notify Bob’s instance that Alice blocked him if Bob’s instance is running Piefed and it will delete the comment, but that part I’m least sure about.
The way blocks work in Lemmy is that a user will simply not be shown what they block, federation is completely unaffected. An ordinary user can only decide what they are shown not what others are shown.
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.
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I was going to agree to disagree, but I couldn’t resist biting one more time because the link you posted turned out to be really interesting, but probably not for the reasons you were expecting… It’s past midnight where I live and I have work tomorrow so I’ll keep this one short.
Two things. First, just a reminder that like I wrote in my last message, I’m not arguing for any instance to re-federate Hexbear or Lemmygrad. It’s clear even just from reading this thread that most users don’t want to see them, and that’s actually a perfectly valid reason to maintain the status quo. But at this point it’s also pretty clear that ideological reasons and personal opinions are part of why those instances are so widely defederated and we are lying to ourselves if we insist otherwise.
Second, let me prove it by using your alt’s post you linked. I’ll be really frank here as you seem like someone who won’t take it personally. It’s obvious you feel very strongly about this matter, you’re good with words, and you’re not scared to influence others to adapt your ideals. Your post on discuss.online is honestly very well written if that was your goal. It’s manipulative, but not in instantly obvious way. It’s a textbook case actually: (All quotes below are directly from the post)
- Starts with an appeal to fear (“…we don’t even know how many users this is turning away from us…”)
- Overgeneralization from anecdote (“…Though I am by no means the only one that this has happened to - it seems to continually occur for each new user that joins here…”)
- Poisoning the well (“…at which point any further communication to them is already known to be in bad faith…”)
- Appeal to social proof (“…Many of the largest instances across the Fediverse have eventually already defederated…”)
- Loaded language (“…troll instance…”, “…flooding over here…”)
- False consensus (“…most of us…”)
- Shifting the burden of proof (“…the case for defederation from hexbear.net seems much more clear and straightforward - and really, why not?..”)
- Flattery (“…Discuss.Online’s much better admin practices…”, “…you are doing a fantastic job of being admins…”)
- Strategic concessions (“…That one I understand may be more problematic…”)
I could go on, but it’s late and I’m tired…
Then add what looks like a mountain of evidence, but is mostly a handful of trolls and douchebags, something you can find from almost any larger instance. Most people aren’t going to dig through the “evidence”, and just like that, discuss.online defederated Hexbear. It’s not my place to comment on the decision itself, especially since it doesn’t affect me. I’m just pointing what happened there.
This is helping providing confirmatory evidence to something that I have suspected for awhile: that my time on social media is changing me, and not always for the better. The more time you spend around people, the more you will act like them, speak like them, incorporating their words and ways into your own practices. I may have justified all that you said there in my head as it being in service to a worthy cause - keeping the very Threadiverse alive as it objectively dies slowly around us (based on subscriber activity numbers, now being at ~35k down from the peak of 55k and now unlike previously, with far less hope that the situation will ever meaningfully change) - but at the end of the day, since when has the end justified the means?
Except here on Lemmy, people say that it does all the time. Outright murder, guillotining someone, Luigi-ing people, bombing AI data centers, theft, and so on - all are only morally reprehensible if done vs. the working class (and even then, are higher wage-earners exempt?), while encouraged and even outright celebrated when happening to OTHER SIDE.
Then again, I think when you plumb deeper you will agree that an act done by a moderator is quite different than an act done by a mere user, and an act done by an instance admin even more different still. Mere users can be blocked and someone can move on, whereas an admin sets the tone for a pattern of behavior that impacts the entire instance - at which point blocking the one user not only causes direct harm but also does not address the wider issues, particularly for new joiners of your own instance. (Edit: I am not dodging the issue of the messaging vs. its content, just isolating the former earlier and now doing the same in turn for the latter.)
At the end of the day: consent SHOULD matter. It seems like people differ
solely(edit: primarily?) on what constitutes “informed” consent? Which is why I like some of PieFed’s features to not block but at least label certain matters, e.g. my scenario involving ChapoTrapHouse was significantly less likely to have occurred if I had used PieFed at the time, due to how it puts the entirety of the community sidebar text below each and every post. Caveat: 3rd party apps (e.g. Interstellar, Blorp, even Voyager offers experimental support for PieFed) may of course choose to do differently.Oh, before I forget (again), I was going to share this link: https://jeena.net/lemmy-switch-to-piefed, which gives the perspective of someone who tried installing both Lemmy and PieFed software on their machine, and found the latter significantly easier. I have no direct experience there, but hope that will be enlightening:-).
Though while for someone spinning up their own instance the choice of software (Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, etc.) is the top priority, I am coming to realize that otherwise it is the choice of instance admin that impacts and end-user’s experience above all else.
And btw I meant everything that I’ve said genuinely. Also, as you dig deeper, pay attention to the comments in response to that post: people agreed, both commenters and lurkers who signalled assent merely with voting, plus backed up as you see in the comments of this very post now. A lone post from a single person is insufficient to make things happen, unless it merely stated what others already felt was true, and it got the ball rolling. Together, apes strong. We can make the Threadiverse a more pleasant space for people - especially the uninformed to more gently introduce them to what is here. Though as to whether that ends up being a good thing or not, to encourage usage of social media… that is a topic for another time, and one where I am far less prepared to address.
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.
deleted by creator
Actually it was mostly hexbear to initiate defederations. Hexbear has an allowlist of federated communities instead of a denylist and which is why it doesn’t show up in the graph. The only instance to initiate defederation that I’m aware of is lemmy.world’s “pre-emptive defederation as a last resort”.
