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Dispelling the myth of a universal "Lemmy" community, and discussion of what the fediverse really is (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Cipher to c/technology

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Like many, when the recent defederation went down, I decided to create a couple other logins and see what the wider fediverse has had to say about it.

I've been, honestly, a bit surprised by the response. A huge portion of people seem to be misidentifying communities as belonging to "lemmy" as opposed to the instances that host them. I think a big portion of this seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what this software is, and how it works.

For example, lemmy.world users are pissed at being de-federated because it excludes them from Beehaw communities. This outrage seems wholly placed in the concept that Beehaw's communities are "owned" by the wider fediverse. This is blatantly not how lemmy works. Each instance hosts a copy of federated instances' content for their users to peruse. The host (Beehaw in this example) remains being the source of truth for these communities. As the source of truth, Beehaw "owns" the affected communities, and it seems people have not realized that.

This also has wider implications for why one might want to de-federate with a wider array of instances. Lets say I have a server in a location that legally prohibits a certain type of pornography. If my users subscribe to other instances/communities that allow that illegal pornography, I (the server admin) may find myself in legal jeopardy because my instance now holds a copy of that content for my users.

Please keep this in mind as you enjoy your time using Lemmy. The decisions that you make affect the wider instance. As you travel the fediverse, please do so with the understanding that your interactions reflect this instance. More than anything, how can we spread this knowledge to a wider audience? How can we make the fediverse and how it works less confusing to people who aren't going to read technical documentation?

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[–] david@feddit.uk 2 points 1 year ago

This is the best solution - copying accounts across would just replicate the problems of being overwhelmed that the beehaw mods were trying to avoid by defederating. They absolutely would want to stop auto-copying of accounts from exactly the same instances that they've defederated from.

Having fediverse apps that can handle multiple accounts would solve the problem for folks that can be bothered to make a beehaw account because they like the vibe over here but stop the low effort folks from carelessly posting low effort, high hassle nastiness here because they think that federated means unmoderated freedom rather than cooperative interlinked communities, partly because they just don't see beehaw posts for them to interact with.