I’m a mod of [email protected], and the last resort preemptive defederation from hexbear has me concerned. As a mod, what are the specific rules that I need to know about to make sure our community fits the guidelines of LemmyWorld? We aren’t a huge community and there aren’t a huge number of posts every day, but I want to see this community grow and thrive. I can’t do that without knowing the guidelines hexbear violated to warrant defederation. We’re focused on left unity, so I need to know what we can’t allow.
I don’t think it makes it unworkable, but I think it warrants a democratic process in this kind of decision making. We as a society should shift away from the mindset of “this is my ball, you just get to play with it” and embrace the idea that forming instances is a form of mutual aid (maybe that’s part of why I’m a mod there lol). I think hexbear culture might leak a bit, but I think you’re right that it will mostly stay there (also I personally I enjoy their style of humor).
As for moving the community, I would like for it to stay here. We aren’t big or active enough to get a migration to occur, and most of the alt instances already have a leftism community. If the admins want to pivot to strictly no politics, then fine I guess
But an instance is someone’s ball the server, the domain name, the admin credentials, etc. We are guests here, including community mods. And the server admins as you say are volunteers. They shouldn’t have to put up with bullshit just to please us. So any topic community like politics that generates disagreement will be precarious.
Starting a new instance isn’t the answer because of siloing and network effects. So we need more of a peer to peer model than a federation of servers. Or anyway, put the federating onto the client side. I made another post about that earlier.
Isn’t federation already a form of peer-to-peer networking? And while I agree that clients need the ability to block entire instances, spinning up your own server is already a way to do that.
Without something to enforce that Democratic process, and with no incentive for instance hosts to commit to it, it’s unworkable.
The issue with the whole platform, from the get go, has always been that without a central authority to hold it together, each instance is inevitably going do whatever it wants. The technology for Lemmy does not inherently solve the social issue. Defederation, as a concept, is antithetical to the ideal of the fediverse. But it’s also necessary to keep it managed. As long as people can choose to, for any reason, they will use that tool.
I think a new solution needs to be proposed. Like…I don’t know, floating communities or something. Communities that are not tied to any instance. Or perhaps instances that only host communities, not users. Just spitballing, I have no idea what can be done.
The way it exists now is not going to save us from another Spez, it’s just giving us hundreds of mini-Spez’s.