Heya, with recent news of beehaw.org defederating from a few instances, I noticed that we also recently defederated from sh.itjust.works. I'm not in-tune with whether they deserve it or not, but I have noticed that it does have some impacts on our users.
I happened to see this post from a fellow furry, expressing frustration with picking the 'wrong' server. They can also no longer see pawb.social posts/communities.
I also recently posted my little heart script over there because they had a general scripts community, and I've only just noticed that the edits/updates I've been doing on that post are not actually going anywhere - it's similar to being shadowbanned. The pawb.social version of that post gets updated as normal, but we never sync that version to their server (and subsequently no other server ever gets the updated version). This makes sense now that I know we're defederated, but nowhere in the UI does it indicate that I'm just shouting into the void. As a side effect, I'm no longer able to keep tabs on that scripting community for tool updates.
- Pawb version: https://pawb.social/post/43513
- sh.itjust.works version: https://sh.itjust.works/post/89693
I suspect that this is a big problem right now because people are migrating and joining servers at random, and they don't know that the server they're joining has bad admins. Communities are rapidly getting created, growing, then getting shadowbanned by half the lemmyverse.
I'm not petitioning for anything to change at pawb.social at the moment, and I'm sure that there were good reasons to defederate sh.itjust.works, but it does make me a bit wary that eventually I too might feel like I picked the 'wrong' server if a defederation culture becomes common in the lemmyverse. It's not something I thought I had to think about when making an account. I really doubt anyone reputable will ever defederate us, so it's really just a matter of who we choose to defederate.
Thoughts?
I must say, I do have to agree that care must be taken with defederating. While I certainly understand doing so from instances which are highly toxic, or those that are actively engaging in spamming. Banning very large instances, like SIJW, could start to cause a lot of issues as more communities move over from Reddit. Here's a list I found on Reddit of some communities that have established themselves (I don't know of it's in an official manner or not, but not sure it 100% matters in this case) on Lemmy apparently. Many are on lemmy.ml, but others are on different instances too, such as lemmy.world. That's definitely going to be a problem soon if we defederated from omw of those.
I support defederating from actively troublesome instances, but only in a reactive way. Proactively defederating could lead to more issues than it solves. Unless we actively had issues from SIJW, I don't see a reason to defederate from them? (It would help of we could just block certain communities from instances, instead of having to defederate entirely)
There's probably the bigger issue of culture shock for those crowding to Lemmy as an escape from Reddit, of whether those individuals will choose to adapt to interacting/debating with people dissimilar to them. The problem of Reddit (as one of the reasons I've stopped touching it many years ago now) is some of the insularity of the platform, especially when you have overcontrolling mods in a subreddit that suppresses any dissenting outlook (which then creates a monoculture).
Whereas on the fediverse the rules are very different, since anyone from any platform that also speaks ActivityPub can step in on a conversation. Just a discounted $2 domain from Namecheap and someone's able to set up another instance with little friction. Meanwhile if a community goes whitelist-only, it just erects a wall around the userbase, and typically stops the growth of the instance, with people ditching it because of lack of activity. Even with defederation back to days of OStatus, there'd always be some momentary drama where an admin would block an entire server, often just because of a few users (while users have a Block button they can use; or in the worse case, the admin can block specific users of a remote instance). Nonetheless, that's played out plenty against ShitposterClub for years (of disproportionate server-wide bans), and yet, it's all the ban-happy instances that have disappeared, while ShitposterClub still lives on strong today.
There's going to be instances that'll pop up with abusive admins that'll try to subversively control the policies/moderation of remote instances (e.g. "ban this user of your's, or else we'll defederate you", or more stupidly "don't use this software, because of the developer's political views"); however, admins should never play into that coercion. Even if there's a few friends exclusive to that instance, there's no justification to let a manipulative actor get what they want. Over time, an overcontrolling instance admin will usually try to desperately tighten their grip, and usually any sane people will ditch for better instances--so don't strain too much over unfair acts of defederation in the present.
But ultimately it comes down to whether any "Reddit refugees" will chose to adapt to the broader fediverse, versus trying to recreate the antipatterns of Reddit and ending up with many hundreds of dead Lemmy (or similar) instances instead.
And as a side-point: I wish people could move beyond the useless word "toxic". There's a broad spectrum of vocabulary in English to describe things, while "toxic" is just used as the quick catch-all of "it's just bad, okay". For example, consider how meaningless the above message would be if I substituted the words "overcontrolling", "manipulative", etc with "toxic" instead. Whereas I'm articulating why something is bad, versus just declaring something 'bad'.