Default instance blocks should largely replace defederation
Since what content users might want to see is quite unlikely to match which servers the admins tolerate, choosing instance on the Fediverse can be quite complicated, which is inconvenient and off-putting for new users.
For this reason, and simply that the Fediverse is stronger united, I believe defederation should ideally be reserved for illegal content and extreme cases. If Fediverse platforms would allow instances to simply block the rest for users by default, the user experience would be the same, unless they decide otherwise.
It already is, you just have to convince the server owner whats ‘extreme’ or not. Some servers hate liberals, others hate the right, some are followers of the windmill party and others would get you on a watchlist.
And the more mundane stuff like having porn and gore posts not tagged as NSFW will get your instance defederated.
I would love to see more middle of the road, non-extremist content. It seems that every instance is all the way left, falling off the chart, and then like 3 instances are falling off the other side of the chart, and defederated everywhere.
Clarification, because people keep misunderstanding my point: What I'm advocating for is replacing most defederation with some sort of "soft defederation" in which instance admins can select domains which are blocked by default for the users, but which they can unblock afterwards if they want to.
That wouldn’t work. I find it strange that some users keep thinking moderation or defederation is somehow about them or to keep them from accessing things. Talk about self-centered to an extreme degree 😅
Defederation is primarily used to keep bad stuff away from an instance and its (volunteer) moderators. Either because it is illegal or because it causes loads of moderation workload in the communities hosted by an instance. Neither of which would your proposal of soft-defederation solve even a single bit.
Well I said that illegal content should still be defederated. And I don't think soft defederated content has to be moderated, since it's only a number of users who choose to see it.
Just because few people can see it in the home instance doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And when a community is viewed from remote instances that have a different soft-defederation list all the bad stuff will be publicly visible (and indexed via search engines).
So for example a feminist community would be full of incel posts that are publicly visible almost everywhere.
Okay, that's entirely fair. I was mostly thinking about the microblogging side of the Fediverse and didn't quite consider the complexity that it would add to community moderation. I guess better moderation mechanisms could probably account for that, but Lemmy is as of now far away from that.
Edit: One might also solve that by not allowing soft defederated users to post in local communities.
Also, how is moderation not about the user? It’s the user who uses the platform; if they wouldn’t care about them they wouldn’t moderate at all, or run an instance in the first place for that matter.
You as a user are a guest of something akin to a private house party and are expected to behave as such. In turn the instance tries to be a welcoming party host by providing an enjoyable place for you to talk with other guests.
Moderation in that case is about removing guest that don’t know how to behave and choose to shit on the carpet. Defederation is about turning away known to be bad guests at the entrance so that the volunteers inside don’t have to clean shit off the carpets all the time.
But surely they won’t just let in guests for their own sake? They’re still doing it as a service for the guests, even if there are terms.
And I’d say that people from federated instances aren’t guests, they are more like people that can talk to your guests. Defederation is more like closing the window between the different parties so that they can’t talk to you because they disturb the peace and quiet. Then it seems entirely reasonable that your guests can still listen to them in a way that doesn’t affect the rest of your party.
Its a private party, not a service to anyone. The host does it because they enjoy having a party with their friends and other people that know how to behave.
And no, federated users are no different from local users. What matters is the server location of the community.
Maybe we’re taking this analogy too far. I just think that the promise of the Fediverse is to be able to be talk to anyone no matter where you choose to be and that we should try to keep this promise. Of course you should be able to keep people out if they disrupt, but it should remain a choice to see their content.
What ethics? Anyone is free to open an account elsewhere.
And its not about locking anyone in, but why should I as an instance host pay for the drinks of someone that takes them to another party with horrible people that constantly try to crash parties over at my place?
I don’t mind doing that with nice people’s parties as I want to go over to their parties sometimes as well.
But if they really want to hang out with these horrible party crashers, they can move over there or make their own party and invite them.
I’d say the Fediverse is a lot more ethical than corporate social media, and that it is the responsibility of everyone who is part of it to help keep it open and help it grow.
I think you need to be more specific in what you mean by that. I don’t think anything in the metaphors that I just wrote is unethical.
Corporate social media is unethical because they spy on you and sell your personal data to advertisers. In addition one could argue they are also unethical because they optimize their algorithms to psychologically manipulate you with the goal of stealing your time and attention so that they can show you more advertisements.
Indeed, so it seems reasonable to help a countermovement grow. Defederation makes it quite a bit more complicated for new users to choose an instance and for anyone to switch instance, and goes a bit against the idea of open social media.
And if moderation is not done because it’s a choice to see them and they are barred from posting in one’s communities, the cost of federation is not very high (except, perhaps, i, edge cases like Beehaw where there is a very large defederated userbase with which users would like to interact)
For 99% of the users, defederation is a complete non-issue and doesn’t effect the choice of an instance at all.
IMHO the only people that are complaining about it are either doing it in bad faith or have been somehow gaslit into believing it is an issue by others that did so in bad faith.
I’d say that figure isn’t quite as high. A lot of people for instance really want to be on Beehaw but are elsewhere because they want to be able to see the content outside their very restrictive moderation.
Also, it looks like a significant proportion of the lemm.ee userbase is there because of the open federation. What other appeal does an instance that doesn’t even allow photo uploads have?
Yes a lot of FOMO and people gaslit into believing it is an issue. But if you look at the main feed of Lemm.ee and compare it with pretty much any larger normal instance other than Beehaw, the content is almost the same (minus some low effort shit posts from Hexbear no-one is going to miss).
Hey – they’ve got trains! But on a more serious note, I do think there are people who want to see the more in-depth political discussion on there. And I’m just saying, it makes joining quite a bit more complicated, and seeing how many people are put off by the sheer existence of different instances, I think it does decrease the ease of entry for many.
Ask people who face open abuse because of their identity how they feel, and you’ll see that not everyone wants what you want.
If there are people who want me dead, then a response of “tough, you and every other queer person has to block them all yourselves, one by one” isn’t the all in one solution you think it is.
Me too. I'm simply trying to spark ideas for devs to give admins more options for how they can run their instances (and also trying to convince admins about what's best for the Fediverse).
Federation copies content from other instances onto an instance admin’s server.
So the instance admin, who is responsible for all content on their server, gets to decide if they want that or not.
Although I don’t think Beehaw blocks sh.itjust.works because it has content that they are uncomfortable hosting. The main reason is (as usual) the comfort of their users, but to help the Fediverse as a whole, instance blocking might be a more constructive approach.
(Edit!: can’t you just block users who you don’t like what they have to say no matter how mild?)
I don’t see why a couple of peeps other users get offended by because they have a different opinion but aren’t bein outright harming/threatening/other Xtreme actions, should lead to those peeps’ instances being blocked and or defederated. looks so pathetically bad when that happens and can also turn off new users
Yeah that seems like it would solve your problems no /s Alotta instances are lenient on their users speech and only ask “no (actual) hate speech etc discrimination” and friendo, a different opinion isn’t either of those things and don’t fall under the rules to get in trouble by
This would likely lead to a lot of content only cached for the 1% of users which change that default which would be quite inefficient for the instance. Not to mention that most admins and mods would likely not see that content so they can not judge the legality of that content (or other reasons to defederate instead).
Content isn't cached unless someone follows it anyways.
And I'm not sure what you mean with that latter part; what difference would this make in what content admins can see before they cast their judgement on a server?
Admins need to make sure they do not host illegal content. They can not do that if they do not see the content so they would likely still have to look at all of it just for the benefit of the few users on their instance who change the default. Instead they could just defederate and not have to worry about that.
There are great sites like fediseer.com to keep track of suspicious instances. And if those users see illegal content they can report it to the admins.
What op said still stands: if only one of your users follow a high-traffic, heavy-content /c/, then the server is caching all of that content for one person.
E.g., there’s this great bot on Mastodon that posts random fractals, and the highest-voted ones “breed” to create a new generation of child fractals. The bot posts a static image and an animated movie of each new child every 4 hours. The images are ca 5mb each; the movies are between 20 & 40mb ea. That is, on average, 210mb/d, or 1.4gb per week. That’s a lot of data. You might, as an admin offering a free service, not want to have to pay for that much storage just because one or two users are suscribed to /c/flamereactor (“FlameReactor” is the name, so you can find this mind-blowingly awesome bot). There’s also bandwidth considerations, both on the pull and when users request the content.
I like the idea, though, and will suggest a tweak, tried and true from Usenet days: provide the ability to unblock to only paying users. It’d give admins control, plus money to offset storage costs. Maybe provide three options to admins: full defederation; auto-block with any user able to unblock, for odeous but low impact sices; and auto-block with unblock for only users in some group - close friends, paying users, whatever.
Lemmy could also transcribe content into links back to the source, but that’s just punting the bandwidth costs onto someone else, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this is frowned upon within The Federation (although it’s common practice with Reddit and X(twitter) content).
There are a lot of ways it could go wrong, for sure. IANAL, but lots of small and large companies have and do navigate these issues. But I wasn’t talking about legally contentious content; this would be a work-aruund for stuff that’s expensive to cache, or stuff you just don’t agree with and so don’t want to absorb the cost out of the goodness of yous heart. Just continue to defederate if you have any doubt.
Anyway, it was just a potential work-around to address OP’s issue. I’m not a Lemmy dev and won’t be implementing it.
No, I wrote that they could be blocked by default but that the users would have the choice to manually opt in.
Edit: Also, the problem is that the instances people want to be on don’t always federate with the instances they want to see content from. Adding an extra server which people have no reason to want to join doesn’t solve anything.
You want instances to use up their server space for shit the vast majority will never even see?
And admins would have to have it unblocked, otherwise they’re hosting a bunch of shit from problematic instances without knowing what it is. Which, worst case scenario, could have legal ramifications.
No need to keep clarifying, I was convinced already this is a terrible idea.
Nah, content doesn’t get federated unless someone follows it. And I said it already I’m not for unconditional federation, if instances do illegal things (which gets well documented, no need to observe it directly), of course you should defederate.
Ah, so you want a ‘hard’ defederation, that works just like it does now, and a ‘soft’ defederation, that users could opt to disable? Interesting.
However, as others said already, that would mean that servers now also have to federate with other servers that most users and the mods probably dont see, creating difficult moderation challenges…
Define “trollin” that ain’t justa different opinion vs yours because nowadays, y’all just as soft as rotten fruit and bruise just as easily so anything can be slapt with rhe TROLLS label O_O
like what I just said for example p sure you or someone else is going to say I was trolllyn with my response but I am not :P
Add comment